i'm okay today, don't think we need the check-in, will log vitals myself and send you the numbers

Meera sent the text at four in the afternoon, two days after the kitchen, three hours before he was due, and then put her phone face-down on the drafting table with the specific finality of someone slamming a door they were fairly sure wouldn't stay shut.

It wasn't a lie, technically. She had felt fine all day — no dizziness, no headache, appetite normal, the dose adjustment apparently holding the way Dr. Kapoor had predicted it would by day four. What she hadn't said, because there was no honest phrasing of it that wouldn't have sounded insane, was: I need one evening where I don't sit across a table from you while you take my pulse and I have to pretend the thing happening in my chest is a symptom you can chart.

He replied within two minutes.

Numbers still need to be logged with someone present for the first week, that's the protocol on dose adjustments, not optional. I'll come by, quick as always.

I really am fine, you can trust the self-report

I believe you. I'm still coming. See you at 7.

She read that last message four times, hunting for an out in it and not finding one, and put the phone back down feeling something that was not, strictly, annoyance, though she was doing her best to file it there.

He arrived at seven, on the dot, same as always, but this time he wasn't carrying the black bag.

"No cuff?" she asked, opening the door.

"Left it in the car. Figured if you're as fine as you say, we don't need the theater." He came in anyway, hands in his pockets, and the apartment did the same thing it always did when he entered it — recalibrated its scale around him — except tonight he didn't sit at the kitchen table like a clinician. He wandered, instead, the way he used to wander into her old hostel room a decade ago, picking things up and setting them down without asking, proprietary in a way that only worked between people who'd never had to build trust because they'd simply always had it.

"You still have this," he said, picking up a chipped ceramic elephant off her bookshelf, cobalt blue, one ear missing.

"You gave me that."

"I know I gave you that. I'm surprised you kept it, it's objectively hideous."

"It's not hideous, it's got character." She took it from him and put it back exactly where it had been, an inch to the left of a stack of sketchbooks. "You bought it off a street vendor in Pondicherry because you felt guilty for haggling him down by twenty rupees and wanted to overpay to compensate."

"That is a slanderous but accurate account of events."

"You do this constantly. You negotiate on principle and then feel so bad about winning you tip the difference back."

"I contain multitudes." He dropped onto her sofa, the old low one with the cushion that had gone soft in exactly the wrong place, uninvited and entirely at home, the way he'd been dropping onto furniture in her orbit for seven years. "How's the tooth clinic going. Did the sad tooth character get his bigger smile."

"The sad tooth character remains professionally, appropriately melancholy, thank you for asking, and Rohan hasn't complained since, which either means he's forgotten or he's building up to another round."

"Knowing Rohan, both."

"You don't know Rohan."

"I know the type. Every industry has one. Mine's called Dr. Iyer, cardiology, insists the informed consent form is 'too long' for every single trial regardless of complexity, wants it 'more friendly.'" He said more friendly in a strangled, put-upon voice that made her laugh before she'd decided to, the old easy laugh she never quite managed with anyone else, the one that arrived without her building toward it first.

"You're doing the thing," she said.

"What thing."

"The thing where you come over under a completely different pretext and then just — stay. Talk about nothing. You did this in college too, you'd show up to return a highlighter and end up staying two hours."

Something flickered across his face, there and folded away fast. "I returned the highlighter."

"Eventually. After several unrelated conversations about whether Rajinikanth movies counted as documentaries."

"They're aspirational documentaries. Different genre entirely." He picked at a loose thread on the sofa cushion, not looking at her directly now, which she noticed the way she noticed most things about him, filed and unremarked. "I wasn't going to not come tonight. I know you canceled because you're annoyed at being monitored, which is fair, it's intrusive, I get it. But I wasn't sure — the self-report's fine on paper, but you fainted four days ago and I wasn't going to just take numbers you typed yourself and call it thorough. That's not about doubting you specifically. It's about doubting the whole premise of self-reporting when someone's motivated to seem fine."

"I am motivated to seem fine. Chronically. It's basically my whole personality." She sat on the opposite end of the sofa, putting exactly the amount of space between them that felt survivable, which still wasn't very much, the sofa being what it was. "You know that about me better than almost anyone."

"I know that about you better than anyone," he said, correcting the almost out of the sentence so quietly she almost missed it, and then, before she could do anything with that, added, "Ananya finally texted back today, by the way. One line. 'Alive, buried, deal closes Friday hopefully, miss you both, tell M I said hi.'"

The name landed in the room the way it always did lately — not unwelcome, exactly, but suddenly present in a way that made both of them shift very slightly, an adjustment neither commented on.

"Tell her I said hi back," Meera said, and meant it, and also felt the specific, familiar guilt of meaning it while sitting three feet from Ananya's fiancé on a Tuesday evening having just laughed harder than she had in weeks.

"I will." He was quiet a second, turning the ceramic elephant thought over without picking it up again, just looking at it. "It's strange, doing this without her around. The three of us, we've never really — there's never been a version of hanging out that's just the two of us, not since college, not really. She's always the middle one. The reason we're in the same room."

"That's not true," Meera said, too quickly, and heard it land too quickly, and pushed forward anyway, because stopping now would have made it worse. "We were friends before she introduced us properly. The printer room, remember, before you two were even—" She stopped herself just short of naming the year, the season, the specific timeline that lived in her like a scar under a sleeve. "We've always had our own thing. It's just usually got other people around it."

"Right," he said, and looked at her for a second longer than the sentence required, and something passed between them again, low and wordless, the same current from the kitchen two nights ago, except this time neither of them had a chart to hide behind, no cuff, no clinical pretext at all — just a sofa with a bad cushion and a chipped elephant and seven years of our own thing sitting undefended in the space between them.

"I should go," he said, standing, too fast, same as last time, the sentence arriving like a man catching himself at the edge of something. "Log your numbers properly tomorrow. Actual cuff. I promise I'll bring the theater."

"Vikram."

He turned at the door.

"Thank you for coming even though I told you not to."

Something moved through his expression — not quite a smile, something more complicated than that, closer to relief mixed with its own kind of dread. "I wasn't going to not come," he said again, like the sentence bore repeating, like saying it twice might make it mean only what it was supposed to mean, and then he was gone, and Meera sat alone on the sofa with the elephant watching her from the shelf with its one remaining ear, and thought that canceling had accomplished exactly the opposite of what she'd wanted, which was, she was beginning to suspect, becoming something of a pattern between them — every door she tried to shut, he walked through anyway, and every time, some traitorous, exhausted part of her was glad.