Chapter 15 — 3AM, Eight Months Later

The summer was good.Inaaya's residency moved into its fourth and final year, which was its own milestone — the beginning of the last stretch, the part where you could start to see the end of the training and what came after it. She applied for a fellowship in internal medicine at Northwestern, which was her first choice and the right institution for what she wanted to do, and she wrote the application with the confidence of someone who knew what they were doing and why, which was different from how she'd approached things a year ago.She got the fellowship in April.She told Arjun in the stairwell of her building at 9 PM on a Tuesday, calling him on the stairs because she couldn't wait to get to the apartment first. He said "I knew" and she said "you couldn't have known" and he said "I knew" and she laughed the car-that-won't-start laugh, the one that surprised her, the one he'd named.His bridge project was finished in June. He sent her a photograph of the completed structure from the engineering team's site visit — a clean span across a river she'd never been to, the load distributed exactly as he'd calculated. She stood in the hospital break room and looked at it on her phone and thought: he built that. Those calculations at 3 AM on a whiteboard in a corporate apartment became that.He moved out of the corporate apartment in June. He found a place in Lincoln Park — a proper apartment, his apartment, with bookshelves he built himself over a weekend and a kitchen that was larger than Manny's counter and a window that looked over the street. She helped him paint it. She was a poor painter; he was patient about this.She did not move in with him.This was a choice they'd talked about — directly, in the way they talked about things — and agreed on: she wanted to be sure she was choosing him rather than choosing not to be alone, and the way to be sure was to maintain the architecture of her own life while building something with him. He had said: "Yes. That's the right structure. You're thinking like an engineer." She'd told him that was a very strange compliment. He'd said it was his highest one.They had dinner together four nights a week. They went to the Art Institute twice more and a jazz club once and the farmer's market every Saturday and Manny's sometimes, together or separately, because Manny's was still Manny's.* * *On a night in August, they went to Manny's at 3 AM.No particular reason — they'd been at a friend's going-away party that had run late, and they were awake, and it was close, and there was no better reason than that.The diner was the same. It was always the same. Lou at the grill. Dana on her phone. The flickering OPEN sign that had been flickering since November and presumably would flicker forever. The particular smell of old coffee and institutional carpet.They sat at the counter. Their stools.Dana put their coffees down without being asked."She still doesn't ask," Inaaya said."She knows," Arjun said. "Dana is paying more attention than she appears."Inaaya looked at Dana, who was deeply absorbed in her phone. "I'm not sure that's true.""She's the one who brought you chamomile tea on the night you needed it."Inaaya looked at him. "How did you know that wasn't just what you ordered?""Because you ordered regular coffee every other night. And you needed the tea." He drank his coffee. "She noticed."She looked at Dana. "Huh."The diner was quiet. A couple in the back booth — young, their twenties, slightly wrong-around-the-edges in the way of people who hadn't slept. Not talking. Just being in the same space.The 3 AM ecology, going on without them."Do you ever think about that first night?" Arjun said."Yes," she said. She thought about it often, actually — the specific texture of it. The way they'd talked to the counter instead of each other. The cold in the diner. Her jacket still on. His bad timing with the coffee."What do you think about it?"She turned her mug. "That neither of us was in any shape to begin anything. That we were both in the worst version of our circumstances. That it was not the right time.""And?" he said.She looked at him. He was looking at her — the specific attention, the one that had been his since the beginning."And it was exactly the right time," she said. "Because it was the time we were actually in. Not some better-circumstanced version of us. Us."He nodded slowly. "I was thinking last week," he said, "about what the therapist asked me a few months ago. She asked what I'd learned from the end of my marriage. And I said I'd learned to be more present. More open. She said that was good but what had I actually learned, not the lesson I was supposed to learn. And I said—" He paused. "I said I'd learned that I'd been waiting to feel ready. To feel like the right version of myself before I let people in. And I was always waiting. And nothing ever made me feel ready.""What made you feel ready?" she said."This," he said. "Showing up badly. At three in the morning in a bad diner. Telling a stranger that I was sleeping wrong for the wrong reasons. All the things you're not supposed to do when you're trying to be ready." He paused. "You don't get ready and then begin. You begin and then you get ready inside the beginning."She thought about the apples she used to buy and not use. The jam she'd almost bought. The future self she'd been grieving."I think I needed to lose that future before I could find the actual one," she said. "The pre-planned one would have been fine. It just wasn't—" She looked for the word."Yours," he said."Mine," she agreed.The OPEN sign flickered. Lou scraped something in the back. Dana put her phone down and actually started wiping the counter, methodically and with apparent purpose."Can I tell you something?" he said."Yes.""I love you." He said it the way he said direct things — simply, without building to it. "I have for a while. I was going to say it somewhere better than this but we're here and it's true and the honest version is always the right version."She felt it land — all of it, the full weight.She looked at his face. The small scar on his chin she'd learned months ago. The way the bad diner light caught his eyes. The posture that was still slightly guarded but less than it used to be, and getting less."I love you too," she said. "I have for a while.""I know," he said."How?""The tea," he said. "You made me tea and drank it yourself. That was the moment I knew."She laughed — the real one, the one that used her whole face.He smiled. The small one. The genuine one.They sat at the counter in the light of Manny's at 3 AM with their bad coffee and let the city do its thing outside — always lit, always running, always open.Outside the window, a cab went by. Then two people walking fast against the cold. Then nothing.Dana wiped the counter all the way to their end and then looked at their mugs."Refill?" she said.They both looked at her. She was already holding the pot, entirely unsurprised by whatever she'd heard or not heard."Yes," Arjun said."Yes," said Inaaya.Dana refilled and moved on.They stayed until five, which was the latest they'd ever stayed, and walked home through August Chicago — warm and humid and full of the sounds of a city that never entirely slept — with his hand in hers.She did not go to Manny's alone that week.She didn't need to.