He goes to the clinic on Tuesday, alone, without telling her first.

He tells himself this is consideration — that if it’s nothing, there’s no reason to have worried her, and if it’s something, he’d rather carry the first shock of it by himself before he has to manage her reaction alongside his own. He knows, walking in, that this reasoning is partly true and partly the same old architecture of control dressed in a new justification. He goes anyway.

The intake is exactly what he remembers and has spent seven years avoiding: a terminal, a form, a relevance score calculated somewhere behind the desk that determines how long he waits and which physician he sees. He answers the questions plainly. Duration. Location. Severity, on a scale that has never once captured what pain actually feels like from the inside of it.

The physician is younger than he expected, brisk but not unkind, and orders scans he’d rather not have ordered, and tells him results will take three to five days, which stretches ahead of him now like a held breath he doesn’t know how to release early.

He walks home slowly, past the market, past the tram stop with its curling notice, back through the fence gap rather than the gate, because the gap feels, today, like the version of arrival that costs him least.

He doesn’t work. He sits at the bench for a long time, looking at the row where flowers used to be, at the beds beyond it doing their ordinary unbothered growing, and lets himself think, for the first time without flinching away from it, about what three to five days might deliver.

He thinks about Lena.

He allows himself, for once, to think her name all the way through rather than skating past it — to picture her, not as she was at seventeen, the last age he actually saw her, but as she must be now, forty-four, a stranger built out of years he wasn’t present for. He wonders whether she still has his mother’s habit of tucking her hair back with one finger. He wonders whether she’s happy, in whatever way the Accord’s version of happy allows for.

He does not decide, tonight, what to do with any of this.

He goes in as the light fails, and does not sleep well, and does not call anyone, and carries the three-to-five days alone, as he has decided, rightly or not, that this first part belongs only to him.