After Kai left, Emily heard a knock on her office door while she was writing up notes. Three staccato raps. She knew those raps; they meant “I. Love. You.” Ezra had been knocking on her door like that for the last four and a half years; it began soon after they started dating, soon after she got her job at NYU, a few months before her twenty-ninth birthday. Originally, he’d said it meant “Em-il-y,” but that changed three months in. It became “I. Love. You.” A love that had only grown from there.

He knocked again.

Emily opened the door, and her worries about her patients, about whether she was pregnant, disappeared when she saw his face.

“Hey, love,” he said, as he stepped into her office and took her into his arms. She lifted her face up for a kiss, and he brought his lips to hers.

“You feel so good,” she told him, once they stopped kissing, when she leaned her head against his shoulder.

He smelled faintly of soap and cologne. She brought her finger up to his name, embroidered on the left side of his button-down, right above his heart, the letters that spelled Dr. Ezra Gold. A gift from his doctor parents when he completed residency, and a favorite of his.

“What happened?” she asked.

He taught one class a week in bioethics during NYU’s spring semester, and otherwise practiced medicine at NYU’s children’s hospital, a mile and a half away, specializing in pediatric blood cancers. He and Emily had started working at NYU the same year, even though Ezra was four years older. His job needed more training than hers did. But he never quite got trained in how to handle when he was feeling overwhelmed by what he was facing, what his patients were facing. He had to figure out how to deal with that on his own. Sometimes he needed to leave the hospital, to jump in a cab for the nine-minute ride to Emily’s office. Sometimes he needed a kiss to get through the rest of the day. Sometimes he needed to tell her what happened. Other times she had to be a detective, trying to figure out why he was so silent at home, what had hurt him so deeply.

“It hasn’t been the best morning,” he said, holding her tighter. “But better now that I’m here with you.”

“Good,” she told him, wondering if today was a day she’d have to dig, if he would let her in or push her away.

—