Nadia finds him in the parking garage at seven-twenty AM on a Wednesday, which is not unusual — they often arrive at similar times — except that he is sitting in his car with the engine off and he has clearly been there for a while.
She taps on the passenger window.
He looks over. He unlocks the door. She gets in.
The inside of the car smells like coffee from the cup in the holder and something else — the faint, specific smell of a person who did not sleep well, which she has learned to read on him the way you learn to read a patient's color.
"How long have you been here?" she asks.
"Twenty minutes."
"Why?"
He looks at the windshield. "Just sitting."
She looks at him. She has, over eight months of working beside him and bringing him food he will not ask for and asking questions he will not fully answer, developed a functional map of the territory he allows people to enter. She knows where the edges are. She does not usually push them.
This morning she pushes.
"Something's going on with you," she says. "Not medically. Not professionally. You're the best surgeon on this floor and you're doing the work and the residents think you're somewhere between God and a very demanding personal trainer. That's not what I mean." She turns in the seat to face him. "I mean the other thing. Whatever you carry home."
He is quiet for a long moment.
"I'm fine, Nadia."
"That's the third time in two months you've told me you're fine in that specific voice."
"What voice?"
"The voice you use when the answer is the opposite." She is not unkind. She is precise. "I'm not asking you to tell me what it is. I'm asking you to tell me whether you're handling it."
Another silence. Outside the parking structure, the city is going about its morning. The sound of it comes through the concrete in a muffled way — traffic, a horn, the distant machinery of Philadelphia waking up.
"I'm handling it," he says.
She looks at him for a long time. She has the uncomfortable quality, as a person, of making you feel that what you say is being processed in full and that nothing is getting through that she hasn't already considered.
"All right," she says.
She gets out of the car. She is almost to the elevator when she turns back.
"There's a case conference at three. I put you on the attendees list. Come, or I will tell Dr. Morrison you eat lunch at the nurses' station sometimes and they'll start using it as a management strategy." A pause. "Also there's food."
He almost smiles.
"I'll be there," he says.
She goes into the elevator. The doors close.
He sits in the car for three more minutes. Then he picks up his bag and gets out.