The Tuesday starts like any other.
Jade is in her office at eight, coffee on the desk, patient files open on the screen. She has a nine o'clock, a ten-thirty, and a note from Dumas's assistant about updated tournament medical protocols that she needs to review before the end of the week. She opens the document, reads the first paragraph, and makes three margin notes in her precise, unhurried handwriting.
At eleven, she has a forty-minute gap in her schedule. She uses it to walk to the administrative wing on the second floor to drop off the updated injury report forms that the tournament coordination office requires in physical copy because apparently some things still require physical copies and to get away from her desk for twenty minutes, which her back thanks her for.
The administrative corridor is white walls, fluorescent overhead lighting, and the faint sound of a printer running somewhere behind a closed door. It smells like toner and someone's microwaved lunch. Jade walks it quickly, heels quiet on the linoleum, report forms in hand.
She hears him before she sees him.
His laugh, specifically low, easy, the kind someone produces when they're performing relaxation rather than feeling it. She knows that laugh. She spent fourteen months listening to it across dinner tables and in the front seats of cars and in the particular quiet of someone else's apartment late at night.
She looks up.
Marc Olivier is at the far end of the corridor, maybe twenty meters away, coming toward her. He's in a collared shirt and dark trousers, a lanyard with the junior affiliate credentials around his neck. He hasn't seen her yet. He's talking to the woman beside him, head slightly tilted, in the way he has when he's making sure someone feels listened to.
The woman is blond, tall, her hand loosely through the crook of his arm.
Jade processes this in approximately two seconds.
She is in the middle of a corridor. There are no side exits between her and them. He is going to look up in the next four seconds and he is going to see her standing here, alone, with a stack of forms, and his face will do that thing that careful, warm, slightly relieved thing the face of someone who is glad that you are clearly fine, because it confirms that he made the right decision.
She is not going to give him that.
The door to examination room twelve is on her left, still four meters back. Too far. There's a supply closet on the right, but the handle is the kind that requires a key card and she'd have to slow down to check if she even has access and by then The door to the medical corridor opens.
Nolan Karev steps through it.
He's in his post-practice clothes joggers, a grey Wolves pullover, still carrying his stick bag over one shoulder. He's looking at his phone. He almost walks into her.
"Hey "
"Tu te souviens de mon copain?" she says.
The words come out of her mouth before she has decided to say them. Fully formed, clean, in a voice she barely recognizes as hers calm, light, completely certain. As if she has been planning this for weeks.
Nolan goes still.
Their eyes meet.
It lasts less than a second. His gaze flicks past her to Marc Olivier and the blond woman, fifteen meters away now. Back to her. Something moves across his face rapid, sequential surprise, comprehension, calculation, decision.
He drops his stick bag. His arm comes around her shoulders.
"Of course," he says.
His voice is easy. Warm. Like this is the most natural thing in the world like they have been doing this for months, like his arm belongs exactly where it is, which is around her shoulders, his hand resting at the curve where her shoulder meets her neck, his thumb very still against her collarbone.
"Marc Olivier," she says, because the man has reached them now and there is no other direction to go in. "I didn't know you were coming in today."
Marc Olivier stops. His eyes move to Nolan not quick, not obvious, just a brief recalibration. Then he smiles. It's a good smile. It always was.
"Jade. Hey." He glances at Nolan again. "I'm picking up some paperwork for the tournament. The digital copy didn't come through." He looks back at her. "You look good."
"Thank you."
The blond woman shifts slightly beside him, and he remembers her. "This is Camille," he says. "Camille, this is Jade. We used to" He pauses, a fraction of a beat. "We worked in the same circles."
Camille smiles. "Nice to meet you."
"You too," Jade says.
The four of them stand in the fluorescent corridor for a moment that feels considerably longer than it is. Nolan doesn't say anything. His hand stays exactly where it is. She is aware of it with a specificity that she will not examine right now.
"I heard good things about the team this season," Marc Olivier says. He's addressing Nolan now, politely, the way you address someone when you're trying to establish that you're the kind of person who doesn't have an ego about these things. "Strong start."
"We've been working hard," Nolan says.
"It shows."
Another pause. Camille touches Marc Olivier's arm. "We should get those forms and let you get back."
"Right." Marc Olivier looks at Jade one more time. There it is that expression. Careful, warm, slightly relieved. You're fine. Good. I'm glad. "Great to see you, Jade. Take care."
"You too."
They walk past.
Jade watches the end of the corridor until the administrative office door closes behind them. She counts to five. Then she steps out from under Nolan's arm and turns to face him.
He's watching her. His expression is neutral not carefully neutral, just resting neutral, which she has learned is different. Carefully neutral looks like control. Resting neutral looks like nothing is costing him anything.
"Thank you," she says.
"Sure."
"You don't have to ... I didn't plan that."
"I know."
She picks up the forms she apparently dropped without noticing. He picks up his stick bag. They stand in the corridor for another moment, the fluorescent lights humming above them, and she waits for something curiosity, a question, anything that would make this more complicated.
He doesn't ask anything.
"I'll see you Thursday," he says, meaning his appointment.
He walks back through the door he came from.
She stays to drop off the forms.
She takes the stairs down instead of the elevator. She walks to the parking garage at the east end of the building and sits in her car with the engine off and the key in her hand.
She runs through what just happened with the systematic focus she usually reserves for complicated diagnoses.
Marc Olivier saw her with someone. He drew the correct conclusion. He left satisfied. That should be the end of it.
It will be the end of it.
She starts the car.
Her phone rings through the Bluetooth before she's out of the parking garage. The screen on the dashboard reads: Maman.
She stares at it for one full ring. Then she answers.
"Hi, Mom."
"Ma chérie." Her mother's voice is warm and direct and carries, as always, the comfortable certainty of someone who calls when she has something to say. "I ran into someone today. At the café on Saint-Martin you know the one, near the pharmacy."
Jade already knows where this is going. She can feel it the way you feel a storm before the sky shows it.
"Marc Olivier," her mother says. "He was very polite. Asked how everyone was. And he said" A brief pause. "He said he was so glad that you had moved on. That he could see you were doing well. That he had seen you with someone." Her mother's voice shifts slightly not suspicious, just attentive. "Someone from the team, he said."
Jade's hands are on the steering wheel.
"He seemed quite sure," her mother continues. "And honestly, I didn't want to tell him I didn't know anything about it, so I said yes, of course, Jade mentioned someone." Another pause. "So. Who is he?"
The parking garage exit is in front of her. She drives through it. The city opens up grey November sky, bare trees, a streetcar cutting across the intersection at the bottom of the ramp.
"His name is Nolan," she says.
"Nolan," her mother repeats, trying the name. "He plays for the team?"
"Yes."
"And you didn't tell me."
"It's recent."
"How recent?"
Jade merges into traffic. "Mom. I'll tell you everything, I promise. I have to drive."
"You have hands-free."
"I have to focus."
Her mother makes a sound that translates to we are not done with this conversation in any language, and says: "Sunday dinner. Bring him."
"Mom "
"Sunday dinner, Jade. I'll make the rice and beans."
She hangs up.
Jade drives three blocks before she pulls over, puts the car in park, and sits very still with her hands in her lap.
Then she takes out her phone and opens a new message to Nolan Karev.
She types: We have a problem.
She stares at those four words for a moment. Then she sends it.
The reply comes in less than a minute.
How big?
She looks out the windshield at the street. A woman is walking a dog that is absolutely enormous, some kind of Irish wolfhound mix, that is pulling toward a trash can with total conviction.
She types: My mother wants to have you for Sunday dinner.
Three dots appear. Then disappear. Then appear again.
The eating kind or the meeting kind?
Despite everything, she almost smiles.
The second one. She makes rice and beans.
A pause.
I'm in. We should talk first though.
She watches the wolfhound finally reach the trash can and investigate it with tremendous satisfaction.
Yes, she types. We should.