When they spoke for the very first time, in the elevator in the Global Public Health building, Emily had been surprised that Ezra noticed her. She’d seen him around—in the hallways, walking from the subway—and he always seemed absorbed in thought, as if the only world that existed was the one in his head. He wore round tortoiseshell glasses, which added to the sense that he was somehow separated from the world, looking at it through a window. And he kept to himself. Only a handful of people on the faculty knew anything about him other than his name.

Once they got together, Emily realized that Ezra’s studious appearance, his quiet reserve, masked the heart of a doctor who felt deeply for his patients and their families, and who was always thinking about what he could do to make their lives easier, how he could practice medicine more ethically, not just to make their health outcomes better but their quality of life, too. He tried, tirelessly, to find trials his patients could be part of to improve their outcomes.

“Your husband is an angel,” his patients’ parents would tell her when she went to the hospital to pick him up at the end of a long day. She thought so, too—though those parents never saw the toll the job took on him. The nights he stayed awake staring at the ceiling afraid of the dreams that might come, the hours he spent inside his own head, unable to find the words to express how he felt. The worst was when one of his patients died, and he spiraled into self-doubt and silence. Sometimes for days.

“Don’t dwell on failure,” Emily had heard Ezra’s father tell him when he felt that way. “Just learn from it.” A sentiment that Ezra seemed to have internalized, like he did so many of his parents’ beliefs.

What she told him, though, was that a death wasn’t his failure. It was the world acting out its plans. He wasn’t a god. He couldn’t fend off the inevitable forever. But Ezra didn’t see it that way. Emily wondered if it was easier to believe it was all in his power. It made failure harder, but it made everything else more meaningful.

—

“Want to talk about it?” she asked him, lifting her cheek off his shoulder.

Ezra shook his head, his wavy brown hair falling in front of his glasses. It somehow always seemed like it needed a trim. “I’d rather not,” he said.

“You don’t have to,” she told him, brushing his hair out of his eyes, knowing he’d tell eventually, when he was ready.