He slumped into the cold metal of the lounge chair and thought bitter thoughts. It wasn’t about the money; a night of focused play and he’d win it all back. What troubled him was that with only a handful of months left to go, he was still bringing his emotions to the table. There would be no do-overs at The Big Drop tournament, no second chance to win it all back. Either you got it right the first time, or you went home.

And then there was Faizl.

Would it kill the grumpy sonofabitch to say thanks once in a while? I don’t know what other seventeen-year-olds are up to right now, but I’m almost sure that none of them are fetching chicken sandwiches for their dads in hospital. What I should do is I should leave. Just walk out of here, find a quiet beach somewhere and open a seafood shack. I could get a nice tan, play cards with the Russian tourists . . . whoa . . .

The thing that had arrested his attention was a girl. She was wearing a guy’s plaid shirt several sizes too big for her and was wholly engaged in eating a giant oatmeal cookie on the far side of the lounge. Eram crossed the room in about two seconds flat.

‘Of all the waiting rooms in all the hospitals in all the world, she walks into mine,’ he said, doing his best Bogart impression.

Gehna looked up from the cookie she was holding in both hands. ‘Do you have a cold?’

‘What? No. It’s from Casablanca.’

Gehna brushed some crumbs off her jeans and looked at him.

‘“We’ll always have Paris”?’ he tried.

Still nothing.

‘Never mind. What’re you doing here?’

‘Varun had an accident.’

‘Jesus. Is he okay? What kind of accident?’

‘Oh, y’know, the kind where you accidentally ingest a litre of booze, snort some cocaine, pop a shit-ton of uppers and wake up in the middle of the night puking blood. Mom insists on calling it an accident. What’s so accidental about it, I’d like to know.’ She sighed. ‘And speaking of accidents, fancy meeting you here. I mean, what are the chances, right?’

‘Point zero, zero, zero—’

Gehna laughed. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’

He told her about Faizl, at which point Gehna realized that she knew next to nothing about Eram’s life. Something he had said the other night at dinner about being named by his mother had piqued her curiosity, but she had had to deal with the train wreck following her own announcement. Gehna felt mortified that their relationship so far had almost exclusively been about her, her, and more her.

Relationship. What a loaded word. It covers everything from people you’ve known all your life but can’t stand to someone you barely know but love to hang out with.

Gehna suddenly felt a mad itch to do something. Anything. ‘Hey. You want to get out of here for a bit?’

‘Sure. Hospitals make me crazy. Any second now I’ll start yelling for the nurses to “push 500 mg epinephrine, stat” like they do on TV. Aren’t you on night duty with Varun?’