Chapter 3 — What She Carries

Inaaya had not told anyone at work about Rohan.This was her choice and she was clear-eyed about it. Medicine was a small world and gossip moved through it with the efficiency of contagion, and she did not want to be the resident whose engagement had dissolved three weeks before the wedding. She did not want to be the one people were careful around. She had enough things to manage.The official version was that the wedding had been postponed due to "family circumstances," which was technically true because Rohan was family now — or had been, or would have been — and the circumstance was that he had told her, eleven weeks ago, that he wasn't sure he wanted this anymore, which was the polite version of what he meant, and what he meant had taken three more conversations to fully emerge: he had met someone else, was the bottom of it, although he'd dressed it up in language about growing in different directions and wanting different things and she'd let him use that language because the alternative was a conversation she didn't have the capacity for.They had been together for four years. She had started medical school with him at the table every night, studying his own MBA textbooks across from her anatomy notes. She had structured the entire architecture of her future around the assumption of him.It wasn't grief, exactly. Or not just grief. It was the specific disorientation of someone who had pulled a load-bearing wall and was now standing in a structure that was still technically standing but clearly should not be.She slept badly because her brain would not stop making plans that didn't work anymore. Future plans — the apartment they'd been looking at in Lincoln Park, the trip to Portugal for their honeymoon, the practical things like the joint account they'd been going to open. Her brain kept running these calculations and hitting the wall of him not being there and restarting.She'd started going to Manny's because she couldn't read and she couldn't watch anything and she couldn't talk to anyone at that hour, and the diner was warm and lit and didn't require anything from her.Arjun had not asked her about any of this.She found this — not just acceptable but actively good. She wasn't ready to be a story yet. She was still inside the story, still sorting through which parts were true and which parts were the version she was going to tell and which parts were for no one.On the fourth night he came in looking worse than the first three.She didn't ask. She just moved her jacket off the stool next to her, because by the fourth night they'd graduated from two stools apart to adjacent.He sat. He ordered. Dana had started putting his coffee down without being asked."Bad day?" she said, because that was within the rules they hadn't written but were both following."My company sent me a file I forgot to transfer when I moved," he said. "My admin emailed it and in the email she said 'hope you're settling in, let me know if you need anything from the old office.' And in the subject line she wrote — I don't know why she did this — 'Moving Forward Docs.'" He paused. "It's a completely normal phrase. Moving forward. It's nothing.""But," Inaaya said."But I read it three times and then I sat at my desk for a while."She understood. It was the thing about grief — not the big moments, which you braced for, but the small ambushes. The ordinary language that meant something different now."Someone said to me last week," she said slowly — she was deciding how much to say even as she said it — "'I know it's not what you planned but sometimes plans change for the right reasons.' And I smiled and nodded because she meant well and also I wanted to climb out of my own skin."He looked at her. "Plans change for the right reasons," he repeated. "Who says that to a person?""People who haven't had a plan fall apart.""Or people who have, and that's the thing they told themselves, and now they tell other people."She thought about this. "That's more charitable.""I'm trying to be more charitable." He drank his coffee. "It's very effortful."She felt something that was almost a laugh. Not quite. But the internal equivalent.They sat for a while. Lou was doing something involving a great deal of frying. The chess men in the back booth were deep in silence. The woman with the tea was not here tonight, which Inaaya noticed, the way you noticed absences in ecosystems."Can I ask you something?" Arjun said. "You don't have to answer.""Okay.""What do you do when your brain won't stop? At night. When you're trying to sleep. What do you actually do?"She considered the honest answer. "I make lists," she said. "Not to-do lists. Just — lists of things I know. Facts. Types of anticoagulants. The names of the cranial nerves. The order of operations for a sepsis protocol. Things that are definitively true.""Because the things that are not-definitively-true are the problem.""Yes."He was quiet. Then: "That's actually useful. Thank you."She turned her mug. "Does it work for you? Lists?""I make load calculations in my head. Stress and weight and distribution. I've been doing it for years without knowing it was the same thing."She looked at him. "You're an engineer.""Structural.""So when you can't sleep you calculate what holds things up."He looked at his coffee. "Yes. Though lately I've been miscalculating."She understood what he was not saying. She didn't say she understood. She just nodded, and they sat with it, and outside on the November street a cab went by, its lights sweeping briefly through the window, and then it was quiet again.