She appears in his doorway at six-fifteen with a container of rice and what appears to be half a rotisserie chicken wrapped in foil.
"I made too much," she says. She does not look at him when she says it, which means she is lying, which means she has done this deliberately, which means she has noticed something.
"You made exactly enough," Gideon says. "For one person."
"I made enough for two people and then I wasn't hungry." She sets it on his desk. "Also I brought you coffee from the good machine, not the one on this floor that tastes like hot regret."
She places the coffee next to the food. She has been doing this for eight months. Different food each time, always some variation on the premise that she had too much. He has never once believed the premise. He has also never turned down the food.
"Sit down if you're going to stay," he says.
She sits in the chair across from him. She is Korean-American, thirty-two years old, with a very direct face and the habit of asking questions that sound casual until you realize they are not. She is the best pediatric surgeon on the floor and she knows it, in the way that actually competent people know things — without needing to say it.
"You look tired," she says.
"I operated for eleven hours."
"You look tired like it's more than that."
He opens the container. The rice smells like something his mother used to make, which is probably coincidence and is still, for a moment, almost unbearable. He eats without answering.
"The boy is going to be fine," she says, after a while.
"I know."
"His mother cried for about forty-five minutes straight when you talked to her."
"I know that too."
"She called you a miracle worker."
"I'm not."
"I know." Nadia looks at him in the particular way she has, which is very still, taking everything in. "What are you, then?"
It lands differently than she probably intended. He does not let it show.
"I'm a surgeon," he says. "Which means I cut out the things that are killing the patient and then I sew up the damage and I try very hard not to think about the fact that the world is going to keep producing the same problems faster than I can address them in an operating room."
She is quiet for a moment. "That's a very specific answer to a pretty general question."
"You asked a pretty specific question."
She almost smiles. Not quite. She looks at him with those dark, still eyes and he has the distinct sensation she is filing something away. Nadia is not naive. She never has been. She has looked at him with this particular quality of attention for months now, and he does not know what she has concluded and he is not going to ask.
"Eat the chicken," she says. "It'll get cold."
He eats the chicken. She stays for twenty minutes, talking about a case, and when she leaves she does not mention whatever it was she came to figure out.
She never does. Not yet