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The problem with having a surgeon for a mother was that she scheduled things.
Not suggested. Not floated. Scheduled. The way she scheduled a lap chole: date, time, participants, no wiggle room for the participants to develop opinions.
“Saturday,” Javadi said into her phone, wedged between the vending machine and the wall of the break room where the signal was worst, and the privacy was best. “Saturday, as in this Saturday.”
“The gala, Victoria. The Foundation gala. You’ve known about the gala since March.”
“I knew about the gala. I did not know about the Dev.”
“Dev Kapoor is a lovely young man. Second-year derm at Allegheny. Priya says he’s very grounded.”
Priya says. Javadi closed her eyes. Priya Kapoor had been her mother’s best friend since their intern year, which meant that Priya’s son had been getting orbited into Javadi’s path since roughly the age of six, when they’d been made to hold hands at a Diwali party, and Dev had wiped his nose on hers.
“Mom, I don’t want to go with Dev.”
“You’re not going with him. You’re going, and he’s going, and you will sit at our table and be pleasant. Your father already told Priya yes.”
“Dad told—”
“He’s picking you up at six-thirty. Wear the blue.”
“I’m not—”
“I have a Whipple at two. Love you. Wear the blue.”
The line went dead. Javadi stayed where she was, phone against her ear, listening to nothing, and thought with total clinical clarity: I would rather be intubated.
“That,” said a voice behind her, “was the saddest phone call I have ever eavesdropped on, and I once listened to Whitaker try to cancel a gym membership.”
Santos was leaning in the doorway with a coffee she had definitely stolen from the attendings’ pot, scrub cap pushed back, looking like a person with nowhere to be and every intention of staying.
“How long were you standing there?”
“Since ‘Saturday.’ Who’s the Dev?”
“Nobody. A derm resident. It’s—” Javadi shoved her phone in her pocket. “My parents are setting me up with their friend’s son for the Foundation gala and I have to go because my mother chairs the surgical elective placement committee and my father already said yes and I’m going to have to sit through four hours of Dev Kapoor telling me about retinoids.”
“Wow.” Santos sipped. “Devastating. Truly. Are they at least springing for the open bar?”
“I can’t drink at the open bar. My mother is at the open bar.”
“Then I don’t see how this is my problem, Crash.”
And that was where it should have ended. That was where a person with functional self-preservation would have let it end. Javadi could feel the idea forming anyway—could feel it the way you felt a bad decision at hour fourteen, fully aware and unable to stop your hands.
“You could come.”
Santos’s cup stopped halfway to her mouth.
“As my date. My plus-one. If I already have a date, my mother can’t—she can’t pull the Dev on me. She’d have to be gracious. She’s incapable of not being gracious in public. It’s a documented weakness.”
“You want me,” Santos said slowly, “to go to a black-tie hospital gala, with you, as your fake girlfriend, in front of your surgeon mother, so you can dodge a dermatologist.”
“When you say it like that—”
“I’m saying it exactly like it is.”
“Please.” Javadi hated the word in her own mouth. It came out too honest. “Santos. Please. I’ll owe you. I’ll cover your next two weekend shifts. I’ll do your notes for a month. I will personally restock every suture cart on this floor until I graduate.”
Santos looked at her for a long moment, and something happened behind her eyes—the thing Javadi could never get a read on, the fast, private calculation that always ended in a smirk.
“Your mom’s still doing the surgical elective placements, right?”
Javadi blinked. “She—yes. She sits on the committee.”
“I want a letter.”
“A what?”
“A recommendation. From Dr. Shamsi. For the surgery elective, spring block. I put in for it twice, and I keep getting bounced for people whose parents golf with Dr. Fred Miller.” Santos shrugged, easy, like she was asking to borrow a pen. “You get me a letter from your mother, I get you out of Dev. That’s the deal.”
“That’s—I can’t just make my mother write you a letter.”
“Then I can’t just make myself free on Saturday.”
“She barely writes letters for people she likes.”
“Guess you’d better make her like me.” Santos pushed off the doorframe. “Six-thirty? I heard six-thirty.”
“Six-thirty,” Javadi said, and heard herself agree to it, and did not, under any hypothesis she could construct, understand why her pulse had gone up.
“Wear the blue,” Santos said over her shoulder, and left.
* * *
Javadi did not wear the blue.
She wore the black, the one with the neckline her mother called a choice, because at some point between Thursday and Saturday the exercise had shifted from getting out of Dev to demonstrating to Trinity Santos that she was a fully realized adult woman who owned more than one dress, and she was not going to examine that shift, she was just going to stand in her own kitchen at six twenty-six in heels she couldn’t walk in and re-pin the same piece of hair for the fifth time.
At six twenty-nine the buzzer went. Of course it did. Of course Santos was on time.
Javadi buzzed her up and then stood behind the door with her hand on the knob and told herself, very reasonably, that there was nothing to be nervous about. It was Santos. Santos, who had watched her faint. Santos, who had named her after it. Santos, who was going to show up in whatever she wore to Whitaker’s roommate dinners and make a face at the apartment.
She opened the door.
The suit was black. That was the first thing, and then for a few seconds it was the only thing, because the suit was black and tailored, cut close through the shoulders and the waist like it had been built on her, and under the jacket—
There was no shirt under the jacket.
There was a lapel, and then there was skin, a long clean line of it from the base of her throat down past her sternum, gold at the collarbone from what remained of the summer, and a single button holding the whole geometry together, and Javadi’s brain, which had once caught a Wolff-Parkinson-White on a rhythm strip two residents had already signed off, produced the following complete diagnostic assessment:
Oh no.
“Hi,” Santos said.
Javadi’s hand was still on the doorknob. She was aware of this. She was also aware that she had not said anything, and that Santos’s mouth was starting to do the thing, the corner-lift, the I’m going to enjoy this thing.
“You,” Javadi said. “That’s a suit.”
“It is a suit.”
“Where is your shirt?”
“Didn’t come with one.”
“It—suits come with shirts, Santos, that’s the basis of—”
“Crash.” Santos stepped over the threshold, and Javadi stepped back without deciding to. The hallway smelled like Santos’s apartment always smelled, something dark and clean under the antiseptic that never fully washed out of any of them. “You said make your mother like me. This is me. Making an effort.”
“This is not an effort. This is a provocation.”
“Both things can be true.” Her eyes went down and came back up, unhurried. “You didn’t wear the blue.”
“No.”
“Good call.”
And there it was again, the pulse, the stupid tachycardic pulse, and Javadi turned around to get her clutch off the counter so she didn’t have to look at the collarbone anymore, and then had to look at it again anyway, because Santos had followed her into the kitchen and was holding the door.
“Car’s downstairs,” Santos said. “Try not to fall down the stairs. I’m not carrying you in these shoes.”
“You’re wearing flats.”
“Yeah,” Santos said. “I’m not the one who has to be carried.”
* * *
The PTMC Foundation held its gala in the ballroom of the William Penn, which meant chandeliers, which meant a string quartet nobody listened to, which meant six hundred people in formalwear pretending they had not seen each other bleed. Javadi had been coming since she was eleven. She knew the layout the way she knew the Pitt: the bar on the left, the silent auction along the back wall, the surgery tables closest to the stage because her mother liked to be seen clapping.
What she did not know—had not accounted for, in any of the eleven contingency plans she’d built on the drive over—was what it would be like to walk in on Santos’s arm.
Because Santos didn’t walk into the ballroom. She entered it. Hand at the small of Javadi’s back, thumb resting exactly where the dress ended and her spine began, steering her through the crowd like she’d been doing it for years. When the coat-check girl smiled at them, Santos smiled back and said, “She picked the dress, I picked the shoes, we’re both regretting the shoes,” and the girl laughed, and Javadi felt the thumb press once, lightly, before it let her go.
“What was that?” she said out of the side of her mouth.
“What was what?”
“The—” She could not say thumb. “The bit. With the shoes.”
“We’re a couple, Crash. Couples have bits.” Santos lifted two glasses off a passing tray and handed her one. “Drink that. You look like you’re about to code.”
“My mother—”
“Is at the surgery tables, and we’re not, and you’re a grown woman holding a glass of champagne at a party. Breathe.”
Javadi breathed. It didn’t help much, because Dana Evans was bearing down on them from the left with the expression of a woman who had just been handed the best piece of gossip of her fiscal year.
“Well,” Dana said. “Well.”
“Dana,” Santos said, and did not take her hand off Javadi’s back.
“I did not have this on my card.” Dana looked from one of them to the other with visible, joyful predation. “How long?”
“Couple months,” Santos said, before Javadi could open her mouth. “We’ve been keeping it quiet. You know how it is.”
“I do know how it is. I know exactly how it is. Robby!” She twisted around. “Robby, get over here, you owe me twenty dollars.”
“You had a bet?” Javadi said.
“Honey, everyone had a bet.” Dana patted her cheek. “You look beautiful. She looks like she’s about to get arrested. Hold onto her.”
Robby did not come over, because Robby was cornered by a donor in the middle distance and could only raise his glass at them with an expression of resigned suspicion, but the damage was done. Word moved through a hospital faster than sepsis. By the time they reached the auction wall, Perlah had waved, Mateo had done a visible double-take at the collarbone, and a pharmacy tech Javadi barely knew had said “Congrats, you guys,” with total sincerity.
“They all think we’re real,” Javadi said, low, examining a donated set of golf clubs with the intensity of a person who had never once golfed.
“That’s the assignment.”
“You didn’t have to say months.”
“You want me to say weeks? Weeks is nothing. Weeks is a fling. Your mother’s not going to respect a fling.” Santos leaned in to read the bid sheet, and her shoulder pressed into Javadi’s, warm through the wool. “Months is a commitment. Months means I’ve met the parents already and I’m not scared of them. Months means you’ve been holding out on her.”
“Have I been holding out on her?”
“Baby,” Santos said, in a tone Javadi had never heard come out of her, soft and amused and entirely without teeth, “you have been holding out on everybody,” and then she picked up the pen and bid four hundred dollars on the golf clubs in Javadi’s name.
“I don’t golf.”
“You do now. Your dad golfs, right? Now you have something to talk to him about.” She capped the pen. “See? I’m being useful.”
Javadi looked at her. At the line of her in the suit, at the easy angle of her against the table, at the bare, shameless throat, and the thing under her ribs did the slow rearranging it had been doing since the doorway, and she said, carefully, because she needed the data:
“What are you doing?”
Santos met her eyes. The corner of her mouth went up.
“Playing the part, Crash.”
Which was the correct answer. It was the answer Javadi had asked for. It just did not, under any reading, explain why Santos’s hand had come up while she said it and tucked the re-pinned piece of hair back behind Javadi’s ear, and stayed there a half-second too long, and why her thumb had gone along the edge of Javadi’s jaw on its way down, like she was checking something. Like she was checking it was still there.
* * *
Dinner was a chicken that had died for nothing, a keynote from the Foundation president about the heroes in this room that made every actual hero in the room stare into their water glasses, and forty minutes of Santos being, without exaggeration, the best date at the table.
Javadi had not prepared for this. She had prepared for Santos to be Santos: sharp, bored, a little cruel about the centerpieces. She had prepared to spend the night running interference. Instead, Santos asked the anesthesiologist across from them about his kids and listened to the answer. She got the Foundation trustee’s wife laughing so hard she had to put her fork down. And every time Javadi reached for anything, Santos was already there: the salt, the bread, her own untouched glass of water swapped for Javadi’s empty one without a word or a look.
“You’re very good at this,” Javadi said, under the applause for the keynote.
“At what?”
“At—” She gestured. The table. The trustee’s wife, still wiping her eyes. “People. Being liked. I didn’t know you did that.”
“I don’t, usually.” Santos clapped twice, politely, for the president. “Costs too much.”
“So why tonight?”
Santos didn’t answer. She just looked at her for a second, in the candlelight, with the quartet sawing away at something Javadi couldn’t name, and then the president said and now, please, enjoy the dancing, and Santos stood and held out her hand.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t dance in these shoes.”
“You can’t walk in those shoes. That’s never stopped you.” The hand stayed out. “Crash. Your mother is at table two, and she is watching, and I am not going to let her think I brought you to a party and then let you sit in a chair all night. Up.”
Javadi got up.
The dance floor was a mistake in the way that most of the best things in her life had been mistakes—things she had been dragged into by someone with less sense and more nerve. Santos put a hand on her waist and took her other hand and said, “Just lean on me, I’ve got you,” and Javadi leaned, because the shoes gave her no choice, and found out that Santos had, in fact, got her. Completely. That there was a place between her shoulder and her jaw where the suit gave way to skin, and that if Javadi turned her head one degree to the left, her cheek would be against it.
She did not turn her head. She was not an animal.
“You smell like the on-call room,” she said instead, for something to say.
“That’s a compliment where I come from.”
“Where you come from is the on-call room.”
Santos laughed, short and real, and it moved through the whole front of her, through the place where they were pressed together, and Javadi felt it in her own sternum like a second pulse.
“Hey,” Santos said. Quieter. “You’re doing fine.”
“I’m not doing anything. You’re doing all of it.”
“You showed up. You wore the black.” The hand on her waist flexed once. “You said please. That was doing something.”
“Santos—”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing?”
It came out more honest than she meant it to. Too much of the doorway in it. Too much of the thumb along her jaw and the water glass and baby. Santos heard it—Javadi watched her hear it, watched something in her face go still and then decide.
“Playing the part,” she said. But she said it into Javadi’s hair, and she didn’t let go when the song ended, and neither did Javadi, and they stood there for the whole three-second gap before the quartet found the next tune, holding on, playing nothing.
* * *
Her mother found them at the bar.
Javadi had known it was coming the way you knew a bad lab value was coming: not by the number, but by the way the nurse held the printout. She’d clocked her mother clocking them at the auction wall. She’d felt the specific temperature of being looked at from table two, all through dinner, all through the dance. And now there was her mother in the crowd, moving toward them in the good gray silk, with her father a half-step behind, and behind him—
“Oh,” Javadi said. “Oh, she brought him.”
Dev Kapoor had grown into his nose. That was the first thing. He was tall now, and handsome in the way of a man who moisturized on a schedule, and he was wearing a tux that fit him perfectly and an expression of polite, dawning confusion, like a person arriving at a surprise party for someone else.
“Victoria,” her mother said.
“Mom. Dad.” A beat. “Dev. Hi. You—wow. You got tall.”
“Vic.” Dev’s eyes went to Santos, and to the collarbone, and back. “I—hey. I think I might have gotten my wires crossed. My mom said—”
“Dev was kind enough to come as your escort,” her mother said, in the pleasant, carrying voice she used on residents who’d forgotten the third thing she’d told them, “as we discussed. I’m afraid we didn’t know you were bringing a… friend.”
“Girlfriend,” Santos said.
She said it easily. Warmly. She put out her hand. “Dr. Shamsi. Trinity Santos. I’m an R2 in the ED. I don’t think we’ve been introduced, though I’ve scrubbed in on two of your trauma cases and you told me to get my elbow out of your field both times. You were right both times.”
Javadi’s mother looked at the hand. Then she shook it, because she was, as documented, incapable of not being gracious in public.
“Dr. Santos.”
“Trinity’s fine.”
“Raymond Javadi.” Her father shook too, and then—because he was her father, and had never in his life met a piece of information he didn’t want to poke—“Girlfriend. Well. Victoria. That’s… news.”
“It’s a few months old,” Santos said. “We’ve been keeping it quiet. Hospital.”
“A few months,” her mother repeated, and turned to Javadi, and there it was, the thing Javadi had been dreading since the phone call, not anger, never anger, her mother didn’t need anger. Just the slight lift of the brow. The small, patient, surgical disappointment. “I see. And you didn’t think to mention it when I told you about Dev.”
“I tried to—”
“Because I would have thought,” her mother went on, “that if it were serious, you’d have said so. Rather than letting your father and me embarrass ourselves in front of Priya.” A smile at Dev, who visibly wanted to be anywhere else. “Dev, I’m so sorry. This is very unlike her.”
“It’s—no, it’s fine, honestly—”
“It’s a stressful year,” her father offered, which was his version of help. “Fourth year. People try things.”
People try things. Javadi felt it land, felt the exact place under her ribs where it went in, and opened her mouth to say something that would make it stop—it’s fine, Dad, you’re right, it’s not a big deal—the sentence she had been saying in some version her whole life.
Santos got there first.
“Sorry,” she said. Still easy. Still warm. But she’d shifted half a step, and she’d taken her hand off the bar to find Javadi’s, lacing their fingers together and holding on. “Just so I’ve got it right. Dr. Javadi, you’re saying she’s going through a phase. And Dr. Shamsi, you’re saying that if this were real, she’d have told you.”
Her mother’s brow went up another millimeter. “I don’t believe I said—”
“No, you didn’t. You’re both too good at this to say it.” Santos smiled. It was not a mean smile. That was what made it so hard to look at. “I just want to make sure I’m hearing you, because I have a lot of respect for both of you, and I want to make sure I’m not putting words in your mouths before I say what I’m going to say.”
“Santos,” Javadi said, very quietly.
“It’s okay.” She didn’t look away from Javadi’s mother. “Here’s the thing. She didn’t tell you because she was afraid of exactly this. Not a scene. You don’t make scenes. She was afraid of the look. The one you’re giving her right now, the one that says I expected better. She’s been getting that look since she was thirteen and you enrolled her in a university with people who could drive, and she’s spent every day since trying to be so good at everything that you’d run out of reasons to give it to her. She hasn’t figured out yet that there isn’t a number of publications that makes it stop. But she will. She figures everything out eventually. It’s the most annoying thing about her.”
Nobody said anything. Somewhere behind them, the quartet was doing something with a cello.
“I think what Trinity means—” her father started, in the tone he used on combative patients’ families, and Santos didn’t raise her voice, just kept going straight through him like he was a chart note she’d already read.
“I know exactly what I mean, Dr. Javadi. I don’t need help with it.” A breath. When she started again, her voice had lost some of its polish, gone rougher at the edges, like she hadn’t planned to still be talking. “She’s twenty-one, and she’s the best med student I’ve ever worked with—I’m including myself in that, which is saying something, ask anyone. She reads a chart like it’s a confession. She fainted on her first day and came back the next morning and hasn’t missed a shift since. Runs a TikTok that’s taught more people to spot a stroke than this whole Foundation has. Cries at the good outcomes and hides in the supply closet so no one sees. Kind to Ogilvie, and nobody’s kind to Ogilvie.” She stopped, jaw working, like the next part cost something. “She is queer, Dr. Shamsi. It’s not a stressful-year thing. It’s not a phase, and it’s not a thing she did to spite you or Priya or Dev, who seems fine and who I hope gets to enjoy the rest of his night. It’s just her. She’s perfect like that. Doesn’t need a single thing changed.”
She turned then. Looked at Javadi. And the smile shifted into something Javadi didn’t have a name for, private, undefended, and she said, “Sorry. I know you had a whole plan,” and put her free hand along Javadi’s jaw, the same place as the auction wall, the thumb in the same place, checking, and kissed her.
In front of her mother.
In front of her father, and Dev Kapoor, and the bar, and the string quartet, and by Javadi’s later, careful estimate, roughly forty percent of the Department of Surgery.
It was not a long kiss. It was not the kiss from the dance floor she had refused to let herself think about. It was closed, and brief and certain, a full stop, and Santos’s mouth was warm, and her thumb was steady, and Javadi’s hand, the one Santos was still holding, closed on hers so hard she felt the knuckles grind.
Then Santos stepped back. She was still holding on.
“Dr. Shamsi. Dr. Javadi. Dev.” A nod. “Enjoy the party.”
And she walked Javadi out through the ballroom, past the auction wall and the coat check and every single pair of eyes in the William Penn, with her hand at the small of her back, not steering, just there.
* * *
The terrace was empty, because it was October and nobody else was stupid enough. The city was doing its thing below them, the rivers, the bridges, the lights of the Pitt itself a few blocks off, that specific window on the fourth floor that Javadi could have found blindfolded. It was cold. She wasn’t feeling it. She was standing at the railing with her arms crossed and her heart going like a code and her mouth, which had just been kissed, still not producing a single usable word.
Santos stood next to her. Not touching. Hands in the pockets of the suit, breath going up white.
“So,” Santos said. “That happened.”
“Why did you do that?”
It came out cracked. She hated the cracking thing. She let it crack anyway.
“Which part?”
“All of it. The—you told her. Everything. Things I never—how do you even know about the supply closet?”
“Everybody knows about the supply closet, Crash. You’re not subtle. You cry like a dial-up modem.”
“You said I was queer to my mother—”
“You are queer. She’s a surgeon. She can handle a fact.”
“That wasn’t the plan.” Javadi turned on her. “The plan was, you come, you’re charming, she likes you, she writes you the letter. That was the deal. That was the whole—Santos, she is never writing you that letter now. You realize that. You just stood in front of the entire surgery department and told the chair of the elective committee that she’s been emotionally undermining her daughter for eight years. Accurately! Beautifully! But you are never getting that rotation, you are never getting any rotation, she’s going to have you doing hernia consults in the basement until you’re forty—”
“Yeah,” Santos said. “Probably.”
“So why—”
“Because it was never about the letter.”
Javadi stopped.
Santos wasn’t smirking. That was the first thing. She was looking at the railing, and then at the river, and then, with what looked like real effort, at Javadi, and her face was doing nothing. No armor, none of the fast private calculation, just—open. Just cold and open and a little scared, which Javadi had never once seen on her, not during PittFest, not during anything.
“I wanted to be the one you asked,” Santos said. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I heard you on the phone sounding like someone was pulling your teeth, and I thought, if she asks somebody, I want it to be me. And then you did, and I panicked, and I said the first thing that sounded like a reason. The letter was cover. I put in for the elective twice. That part’s true, but I didn’t—Crash, I wasn’t going to ask her. I was never going to walk up to your mother and ask her for anything. I just needed you to think I had a reason so you wouldn’t look at me like you’re looking at me right now.”
“How am I looking at you?”
“Like you’re running the differential.”
Javadi opened her mouth. Closed it.
“I meant it,” Santos said. “Every word. In there. I didn’t plan it, I didn’t know I was going to say it until your dad said people try things and your whole face just—went. You went somewhere. And I couldn’t stand there and watch you go. I meant the TikTok and the chart and the supply closet and the—all of it. I’ve meant it for a while.” She ran her thumb along the cold railing before she went on. “And I meant the kiss, and I probably should’ve asked first, so. Sorry. For the not asking. Not for the rest.”
The cello, faintly, through the doors behind them.
The city.
Javadi found, when she went looking, that the differential was already run. That it had been run for weeks, if she was honest—since the doorway, since before the doorway, since a supply room and a stolen coffee and a woman who said I don’t see how this is my problem and then made it her problem anyway, all night, without being asked. Every data point had been sitting in the chart the whole time. She had simply refused to open it.
“You bid on golf clubs,” she said, “in my name.”
“I did do that.”
“I don’t golf.”
“I know.”
“My father’s going to want to take me golfing. He’s going to be thrilled. I’m going to have to learn to golf, Santos, because you—”
“Victoria.”
She stopped.
Santos had taken one hand out of her pocket. It was just there, in the cold, open, palm up, between them. Not reaching. Offering.
“Ask me,” Santos said. “Properly. Not because of Dev. Just ask.”
Javadi looked at the hand. At the suit, the ridiculous, magnificent, shirtless suit, and the throat above it, and the face above that, which was not smirking and was not calculating and was, for once in its life, waiting for her.
She took the hand. Her fingers were freezing. Santos’s were warm.
“Would you,” she said, and her voice did the thing, and she let it, “want to go to a gala with me. Sometime. As my date.”
“We’re at a gala.”
“I know we’re at a gala, I’m—”
Santos kissed her.
It was not brief, this time. It was not closed, and it was not certain, it was the opposite of certain, it was a question and an answer at the same time, and Javadi went up on her toes in shoes that could not support it and did not care, and put her free hand flat on the bare warm skin under the lapel where she had been not-looking all night, and felt Santos’s heart under her palm going every bit as fast as her own.
They came apart eventually. Not far.
“Yes,” Santos said, against her mouth. “Obviously yes. Idiot.”
“That’s not a nice thing to call your girlfriend.”
“You’ve been my girlfriend for four seconds. I’ll get better at it.”
Behind them, through the glass, the ballroom went on being a ballroom. Somewhere in it, a surgeon was rearranging her understanding of her daughter, and a dermatologist was texting his mother, and Dana Evans was collecting twenty dollars. Javadi stood on the cold terrace with her hand inside Trinity Santos’s jacket and thought, with total clinical clarity, that she had never in her life had less of a plan.
“Come on,” Santos said, and pulled her toward the doors. “I’m getting you a coat. And a drink. And then we’re going back in there, and I’m dancing with you in front of your mother until one of us falls over.”
“It’s going to be me.”
“Yeah,” Santos said, tucked the piece of hair back behind Javadi’s ear, and held the door. “I’ve got you.”