Forty Days to Heartbreak

My husband hated me. You want to know how much? I spent forty days in a coma and half a year in his hospital, held together with pins and plaster. He's an orthopedic surgeon.

He worked one floor up. He never came. Not once. Nobody in that place liked me either. Everyone told the same story: I was the one who drove Delphine out. I was the villain.

The bad woman. The day they wheeled me in, halfdead, people actually congratulated him. "Adrian.

You finally get a break from her." The day I was set to leave, his friends looked ready to hold a vigil. "Evangeline's being discharged. God help him.

She'll be back to ruin his life all over again." They were right about one thing. The day I got out, the first thing I did was go find Adrian. I just didn't do what they expected.

I didn't cling. I handed him a folder. "Adrian. This is the thing you've always wanted." "...What?" I smiled. "Open it. You'll see." "Keep the house. Keep the car.

I don't want any of it. I hope you go on to be everything you wanted to be." "And let's not cross paths again." Chapter 1 "She probably earned it.

Do enough ugly things, people learn to keep their distance." A short, ugly laugh. "The girl by the window. What's her story?

Nobody's come for her this whole time." I heard all of it. That was the cruelty of the dark.

Every word, every laugh, came through clean, and I couldn't claw my way up far enough to answer. Forty days down there.

Forty days throwing my whole body at a door that wouldn't open.

You don't know what that kind of dark is until you're buried alive inside your own skull, screaming with a mouth that won't move. Then a cup hit the floor somewhere to my left.

The crack of it went through me like a paddle to the chest. My eyes opened. "Oh—oh, sweetheart, you're awake!" The woman in the next bed. I stared at the ceiling.

Nothing else would move. "I'm so sorry, honey. Did I scare you awake, dropping that cup?" She had it backwards. I wanted to thank her.

It took a scare that violent to drag me back into the light. No one knew how afraid I'd been down there in the dark. How small. Word that I'd surfaced traveled fast.

White coats filed in, checked my eyes, read my chart, said the same thing in the same relieved voice. Good. She's awake. This is good. I counted the coats.

Adrian's wasn't among them. Forty days under, and I'd never once heard his voice. Awake now, and he still wasn't here. "Where's Adrian?" The doctors traded a look.

Just a flick, eyes to eyes and away again. "Dr. Cole is... in surgery. He can't get away right now." "Oh." Here is the thing about Adrian and me. I chased him.

I was the one who ran, who wanted, who wore him down until he married me. And for two years he had looked at me like a bill that kept coming due.

Whatever warmth he owned, he had already spent on Delphine. What was left for me wouldn't have filled a thimble.

If Delphine had stayed, he probably would have married her. "How bad is it," I asked. "My body." The one holding the chart didn't soften it. "When the car hit, you came down on the back of your skull.

The bleeding on your brain is what put you under. Your left femur was shattered, your right arm broken, other breaks besides. You were hurt badly. Forty days, as of yesterday.

The blood's reabsorbing, the bones are set. You're mending." Dinner came around.

The woman in the next bed spooned food into her husband's mouth and turned her head toward me. "Sweetheart, this Dr. Cole you keep asking for. Who is he?

Someone important to you?" He's my husband. What kind of surgery runs long enough that your own wife wakes from the dead and you can't spare thirty seconds?

I shook my head. "We're just acquaintances." "Ah." "And your family?" The only person tending me was a hired caregiver.

All those weeks under, she had been the one washing me, turning me, emptying the catheter. There wasn't a soul in that hospital worse off than me.

So I made something up. "They're in another city. Not well enough to travel. They can't get here." None of it was true.

My parents split when I was in middle school, after my father's affair blew the house apart. The court gave me to him. My mother took the wreckage and moved overseas.

My father signed checks between flights and, three years ago, had a new son with a new woman and mostly forgot the old one existed. There was no one.

Just a hired stranger who had bathed me and turned me for forty days while I was gone.

And a husband one floor up, in surgery that apparently never ended, who couldn't spare the walk. Chapter 2 "Oh no.

Why's the blood running backward?" The caregiver, sharp with alarm. I turned my head.

The IV line taped to the back of my hand had gone red, a thin ribbon of me climbing the tube the wrong way. She hit the call button. The nurse who came was Tiffany Reeves.

We went to high school together. I knew the exact set of her mouth right before she decided to be a problem. She didn't bother hiding it now.

She peeled the tape off my hand like she was hoping it would hurt, and pulled the needle. Back in school, half my class had a private name for me. Homewrecker. Snake.

The kind of girl who climbs a man's name and calls it love. Tiffany swapped the line and left without a word.

The caregiver and the woman in the next bed both watched her go, mouths tight. "She's probably just having a bad day," the caregiver said, reaching for my tray. "No." The neighbor shook her head. "It's her.

With this girl, it's personal. My husband needs his meds changed, she's sweet as pie.

This one, she can't stand." I didn't say anything. "Could you set a little table over the bed?" I asked. "I'll feed myself." My right arm was still in plaster.

My left was all I had. The old me would have made Tiffany regret every second of that. The old me would have had her written up before the needle was capped.

I just didn't have it in me anymore. That was when Adrian walked in.

I was trussed up like something in a butcher's window, elbowdeep in the humiliating work of eating with the wrong hand. My spoon stopped halfway to my mouth.

I know how I must have looked. He glanced at me. One glance. Then past me, to the old man in the next bed. "What's going on over here?" ...He'd come for the neighbor.

I lowered my head and went back to moving the spoon. Mechanical. My whole body gone to static. "Doctor, good, you're here.

My husband says his elbow's suddenly killing him." Adrian loosened the old man's cast a fraction. "Better?" "Much.

That takes it right off." The neighbor frowned. "Did they switch doctors? Wasn't it Dr. Hale before?" "Family thing. I'm covering his rounds a couple of days." "Ah.

You're awfully young for it. Already a surgeon at Bellhaven Memorial. That's really something." A beat. "You got a girlfriend?" Adrian stepped around it. "The cast was too tight.

It was pinching the joint, and that's the pain. Next time it happens, call a doctor right away." He finished with the old man. And then he didn't leave. I kept my head down.

Kept moving the spoon. A pair of white shoes came to a stop at the edge of my bed. Right there. Close enough that all I had to do was look up. I didn't look up.

The spoon went to my mouth. Down again. The white shoes stayed. "Dr. Cole." A nurse in the doorway, breathless. "ER." The white shoes turned. And were gone.

I looked out the window, into the dark, and pulled a breath in through my nose. He didn't come again after that. Dr. Hale came back. There was no shift left to cover.

Our little row of beds was Dr. Hale's now. That night, they said, there'd been a pileup on the highway. A lot of people hurt.

Then Adrian got sent to another hospital in another state, to consult. Then a fire tore through the city and the wards overflowed. Then someone said he'd been sent abroad to train.

He was busy. That was all. He was just very, very busy. Chapter 3 The bed next to mine turned over and over. A new face every week, then gone.

The day I could stand, I started rehab. I was going to walk again. On my own two feet, like a person who had never been broken.

I decided it the way you decide to stop bleeding by sheer will. Rehab hurt in ways that don't have names.

I gritted through it in that room full of other people learning to run their own bodies again, and I did not let it win. Somewhere out there, I had become the joke of my old circle.

The icequeen. The frigid little peacock, flat on her back after a wreck, can't feed herself, needs a stranger to turn her in the night.

We had all been med students at Bellhaven once. Then, my intern year, I cut my hand, deep enough that a scalpel would never sit steady in those fingers again.

So I gave up the blade, and the whole life that came with it. Everyone called it an accident. Half a dozen of them went on to white coats at Bellhaven Memorial.

Not one of them thought I deserved pity. They thought I deserved this.

Everyone knew the story, after all: I was the one who had bullied Delphine out, hounded her all the way overseas. "That's completely normal now.

Wonderful." Four months in, I let go of the bars and walked a full length of the room. My trainer clapped. "Thank you. For staying with me through it." "That was all you.

I mean it." She shook her head. "Your femur came in shattered, one of the worst I've seen.

And you're the only patient I've ever had who went the whole way through and never once cried out. Not a sound." I smiled a little. I didn't tell her what it had cost.

Then they discharged me. I signed the papers and took a cab away from the hospital. I hadn't been back in almost half a year.

I stood there a moment before I pressed my thumb to the lock. The door swung open on the smell of dust. Just like I'd guessed. Adrian rarely came home either.

I straightened the couch and opened a container of soup I'd picked up downstairs. Two bites in, my phone buzzed. I read the group chat and went still.

The old class group. [Evangeline's out of the hospital.] [No way, already? I thought she was in bad shape.] [She'll be back to cling to Adrian.

He must owe her from some past life, stuck hauling her through this one.] [Enough, she's still IN this chat. She reads that, she'll make you pay for it.] [...Oh hell.

Wrong chat.] Then the messages started pulling back, fast, deleting one after another until the screen was clean. I turned the phone facedown and finished the soup.

I slept there one night, alone. Adrian didn't come home. At first light I lifted a stiff hand and pressed it over my eyes, held it there a moment. Then I got up and got dressed.

I took the thing off the coffee table and left. In the last second before the door shut, I stopped.

I looked, one more time, at the threebedroom I had designed down to the last corner. The latch clicked. I walked away. I saw Adrian in the corridor outside orthopedics.

Morning rounds had just let out, a crowd of white coats spilling from the conference room. The second he saw me, his hand froze midpage.

The doctor beside him glanced at the two of us and, reading the room, walked on ahead. I don't know why I could still smile. Why I could walk toward him.

Maybe because I had healed clean, hadn't ended up crippled, and that was already more than I'd been promised. Maybe I had just made my peace.

His skin was still good, the faint bruised shadow under his eyes doing nothing to touch that perfect face. He started to explain. "Sorry.

Yesterday I had three surgeries back to back. By the time I was out, you'd already signed the discharge and gone." I nodded.

I held out the folder. "This is for you." "What?" For just a second, his eyes went blank.

Chapter 4 I shrugged, and let myself smile, light and finished with it. "Open it, you'll see.

It's the thing you always wanted." My voice stayed level. "Keep the house, keep the car. I don't want any of it.

I hope you go on to be everything you set out to be." "Let's not cross paths again." I signed the divorce over to him, stepped back, and let the crowd close over me.

I thought that was the end of it. I didn't know yet that this clean little goodbye was the first day of the worst year of his life. At the airport I took out my phone.

I deleted the pinned contact at the top of the list. Left the class group chat. Powered it down