Her lips pressed together.
A tear slipped down her cheek.
She wiped it away quickly, almost angrily.
“I was so angry with you,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“No, Ethan. I mean angry in a way that scared me. I would lie awake thinking, how could he leave when I was about to tell him? How could he not notice? How could he become a stranger in the same house?”
Each question pierced me.
“And then,” she continued, “I would remember the way you stood in the hallway after the second miscarriage, holding that tiny pair of yellow socks we bought, crying so quietly you thought I didn’t hear you.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“I heard you,” she said. “And I knew you were broken too. That made it harder to hate you.”
I covered my mouth with one hand, trying to steady myself.
“I never stopped loving you,” she said.
The words came so softly I almost thought I imagined them.
Then she closed her eyes.
“But I don’t know if love is enough to trust someone again.”
I nodded.
“That’s fair.”
“I want it to be enough.”
“So do I.”
Rain tapped steadily against the glass.
For a while, neither of us spoke.
Then Sophie reached out from beneath the blanket.
Her hand rested palm-up between us.
Slowly, carefully, I took it.
Her fingers were cold.
I held them like something precious and breakable.
The next morning, they wheeled her away just after sunrise.
Linda stood on one side of the gurney, crying despite trying not to. I stood on the other, holding Sophie’s overnight bag.
Sophie looked paler than usual under the surgical cap.
At the double doors, the nurse paused.
Only one of us could go farther.
Sophie looked at her mother.
Then at me.
For one terrible second, I thought she was going to choose me, and guilt surged through me on Linda’s behalf.
But Sophie reached for her mother’s hand.
“Mom,” she whispered.
Linda bent and kissed her forehead.
“I’m right here, baby.”
Sophie closed her eyes.
Then, just before they pushed her through the doors, she turned her head toward me.
“Ethan?”
I stepped closer.
“Yes?”
“When you go to my apartment again,” she said, her voice faint, “you can read the letter.”
Then the doors opened, and she was gone.
The waiting room became its own kind of wilderness.
Hours moved strangely there. Too slow to endure, too fast to trust. Linda and I sat side by side beneath a television neither of us watched. Coffee cooled in paper cups. Families came and went. Every time a doctor entered, everyone looked up.
Linda asked me once if I wanted to stretch my legs.
I said no.
At some point, she rested her hand over mine.
It was the first gentle thing she had done since I returned.
“She’ll fight,” Linda said.
“I know.”
“She always has. Quietly.”
I nodded.
“I didn’t understand that before.”
“No,” Linda said. “You didn’t.”
There was no cruelty in her voice.
Only truth.
Nearly five hours later, Dr. Shah appeared.
