Every Time He Came Back

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Love heals in more ways than one. Priya Chandrasekaran has a locked room inside herself. She has been a brilliant paediatric intensivist for over a decade. She saves children. She cannot save the grief she carries about the children she will never have, and she has chosen not to try — she has simply locked the room and worked around it. Flynn Callahan has been present for everyone in his life for twenty years and essential to none of them. He is generous, capable, warmly available — and quietly, almost completely disconnected from his own feeling. He has arranged his life so that nothing lasts, because losing things and loving things became the same event somewhere in Afghanistan, and he never separated them again. Theo Nguyen-Walsh, six years old, autoimmune encephalitis, arrives in Flynn's aircraft and in Priya's ward and becomes the thing neither of them can hold at a professional distance. Theo cracks Flynn open first — then Priya cracks him open the rest of the way. She cannot do it intentionally. Neither can he. It happens in the accumulated weight of eleven weeks at a child's bedside, in terrible hospital coffee and afternoon storms and a blue cup and a card game with cheating rules. It happens the way real things happen: gradually, then all at once. This is a novel about two people who have built excellent lives around not needing anything they cannot provide for themselves, and what happens when they meet someone who makes that arrangement feel like loss.