She texts Zack when Dr. Wilson stops to briefly talk to a colleague: I’m a top candidate for chief!

ZACK: Of course you are! Not surprised.

SUHANI: How’s your day?

ZACK: Out of control. Still up for gimlets tonight at Little Spirit?

SUHANI: Can’t wait.

And then, before she can think, she adds, I’ve missed us.

Zack texts back immediately. I’ve missed us, too.

After Dr. Wilson turns at a hallway marked conference suites, Suhani steps into an empty patient room, savoring the quiet and the sunlight splashing the two stiff recliners that are pushed against the window for visitors. The rare moment of stillness infuses her with hope. Today is the day things will start turning around. She and her husband will be okay. Maybe everything from the past two months—all the misunderstandings, moments of irritation, arguments followed by grueling emotional hangovers—was simply run-of-the-mill marital adjustment. A standard rough patch, nothing more. And now they can finally move forward.

She just has to take care of one more thing.

In seconds, she’s pacing down the hallway again. The pain from her heels is overridden by her impending closure, closure she’s been craving for years.

Roshan is standing outside his office, slipping his arms into his starched, spotless white coat.

“Do you have a second?” Suhani says.

“I was just heading out.” He adjusts his dark brown tie under the collar of his hunter-green button-down.

“Then I’ll walk with you.” A quick glance confirms that nobody else is around. Before they’ve even made it two feet, she turns to Roshan and says, “Are you going to get in the way of me being chief?”

“What?” Roshan frowns.

“You show up here and now you conveniently have a say in it. How are you even on the selection committee?”

Suhani ignores the warmth spreading through her limbs, one that feels way too much like fear. It’s not Roshan’s effect on her; that atrophied years ago. This is just a combination of her meeting with Dr. Wilson and her light lunch—an apple, chopped salad, and lemon Spindrift—making her dizzy and disoriented. Mom often called Suhani’s meals “rabbit food” and remarked that it was “unacceptable for Indian people to eat like that.”

“They’ve been needing an attending from neurology since the one who used to do it retired.” Roshan pauses in the doorway of an empty boardroom that has a stack of black folders and gold ballpoint pens in the center of a large wooden table. A projection screen displays the teal-blue homepage of Atlanta Memorial Hospital. Suhani follows him into the room and pushes the door closed with her heel.

“So you’re going to give your opinions on residents you don’t even know?”

“They probably wouldn’t take my input,” Roshan says. “Unless I had something significant to say.”