While I Was Fighting For My Life, He Chose Her

The heart monitor had been shrieked at for an hour before Lena really heard it. Not because it was distant; it wasn't, it was directly above her head and loud enough to make the nurse flinch, but because the worst pain narrows everything to one point, a single breathlessness, and right now that point was somewhere below Lena's ribs, burning, thrumming, so violently incorrect that taking the next breath felt like a choice each and every time. Her body just seemed to have forgotten it had that agreement.

She was looking at the ceiling tiles. One corner was cracked. In pencil someone had scribbled something near the light fixture, faint, but she tried to decipher it, because that was something she could do, something that wasn't watching the forty minutes tick by without anyone calling her back and watching the nurse keep glancing at the door as though she were waiting for someone.

"Mrs. Ashford," the nurse, the one with the weary eyes and the CLAIRE name tag, leaned over her with the kind of hospital gentleness. Gentle. Thoughtful. It was the kind of gentle that knew. "We've been trying to contact your emergency contact. His office confirmed he got the message."

His office.

Lena let that sit there. Turned it around. His office said that he'd received the message, not your husband's on his way to you, not he's just coming down, not even I've spoken with him directly. His office. Some assistant in some glass tower three miles away had taken a look at his caller ID, pushed an answer button, said yes he will be informed, and pushed an end button, and that, according to her life on a Tuesday evening, was it.

"Okay," she said. Her voice was the wrong pitch when she said it, thin, not carrying anything. "Okay. That's, yeah. Thanks."

Claire checked the line with her finger and offered nothing further. There was nothing to offer.

Lena went back to the ceiling tiles.

She had stopped believing Ethan ran toward things about six months ago and she knew exactly when that stopped-his canceled anniversary dinner by text at 7:42 p.m., when she had been sitting already in the restaurant, already working on her bread and butter, already in the blue dress he had once declared made her look like something to hold onto. She had sat there, in her restaurant booth, for eleven minutes after the text. Not because she believed he would change his mind; she knew by then he wouldn't. Because she knew she would need some time alone in a public place before she knew what kind of a wife

Going to say something about it. She had decided at that point to be the one who didn't turn it into a fight. The one who knew that a man such as Ethan Ashford has other more pressing matters on his hands than anniversaries and baby blue dresses and alone women in restaurants.

She had been trying so hard to be sensible that she had somehow failed to see that she had ceased to exist.

The door opened. Her heart, stupidly, still skipped a beat, and then Margaret Ashford entered and the skipped beat settles into something cold and quiet.

Her mother-in-law glided through rooms as if they had all been prepared specifically for her entrance. Silver hair, silk shirt, perfect posture and something that cost money just to maintain. She glanced around the room of tubes and monitors and Lena lying there wan and empty of blood, and her face made that particular complex expression that Lena had learned to read over the span of three years. There was no malice there. Margaret was not precisely malicious. She was just a supremely competent woman who saw something inconvenient, and did the quickest mental calculation of how to deal with it most economically.

You are pale, Margaret said and Lena almost laughed at the astounding simplicity.

"That's about right," he would say about a ruptured appendix. "The doctors said the surgery was routine.

"Margaret sat in a chair near the window without asking and crossed her legs at the ankles. She folded her hands over each other. He would be correct about the surgery being routine, but routine wasn't a very relaxing word when you are the one haemorrhaging. "He's at Hargrove dinner right now. The purchase closes tomorrow morning, Lena. I am quite sure you know what this purchase entails." "I know what this purchase entails," Lena responded delicately, "for most things." Margaret watched her. An entire breath passed between them; too much weight to handle comfortably. "He'll come as soon as he can. As soon as the meal ends." "Where is he eating?" Another breath passed between them; a little too long. "The Meridian." The Meridian was three blocks away from this hospital. Lena passed it a thousand times every day. She knew the awning. She knew the inside and the dim wood. She knew the candlelit glow and how it turned everything inside into a canvas. Three blocks. Four minutes by car, maybe. Less, if someone was trying hard, if someone needed the father of her children, her husband, her wife, her partner; whatever her relationship to Ethan would be called once she went under general anaesthesia and then again in this hospital room where she had been sitting for forty minutes already, which, as it turned out, was the last thing she would need, given what she had discovered via one quick telephone call on a Tuesday in November, just before the Hargrove deal was to close.

Her phone vibrated.

She almost didn't look. She actually and truly and sincerely almost didn't, and she would spend a long time afterward looking back and regretting that she didn't because some things you see, some pictures, then those pictures reside inside you, always, like a splinter your body cannot ever push out. But she looked. Of course she looked.

A gossip account had tagged her. The caption was short and effervescent with the particular glee of gossip captions, SPOTTED: Ethan Ashford and Vivienne Cole dining intimately at The Meridian, wife notably absent. The picture beneath the caption was sharp and bright, impossibly and agonizingly clear. Ethan, in the charcoal suit she had helped him buy. Vivienne, leaning in close across the white table cloth, her hair just brushing the shoulder of his suit, her hand just barely grazing his as if to make a particular statement with the proximity. Both of them laughing. The real kind of laughing, not the polite dinner party laughter, the kind you can't replicate for business.

Lena set the phone down on the sheet next to her.

She didn't throw it. She didn't make a sound. She put it down very gently, then just watched the rain, which was coming in sheets now, blurring the pane, bleeding the streetlights into watercolour washes, breathing through whatever it was going on in her chest, which no longer felt like grief; she'd done that, she'd done the grief at that restaurant, at that table in that blue dress, she'd done it during the countless empty nights in too big a bed. What she was sitting with was more structural. Something she'd ignored because ignoring was easier than dealing with what it meant.

She heard Margaret get up. The scraping sound of the chair. "I'll wait in the other room," her mother-in-law said, and there was a slight change in her tone, some minute adjustment towards what could almost have been called guilt, though guilt always registered on Margaret Ashford as slight impatience.

She did not look up at Lena as Margaret left.

The anaesthesiologist arrived at 8:15. Lena signed whatever he put in front of her, answered his questions readily, even managed a small, slightly desperate joke about disliking needles. He was pleased by her cooperation and her good spirits, noting that in her chart: Patient was calm and cooperative. In good spirits given the circumstances. He could not have written that the patient was calm, and cooperative, in good spirits given the circumstances, because that was not true; and if he had somehow been aware of it, he would not have had the words. She was calm because something inside her had stopped moving.

Had been building itself for months without her knowledge had suddenly slotted perfectly into place. Silence. Pure, utter, irreversible silence.

He doesn't know who I am.

Doesn't know who she was; what she'd left behind, what she'd hidden, what she'd buried deep down in the private corner of her heart she'd sacrificed to the gods of being a good wife to a man who lived three blocks away and was right now somewhere in his office, laughing with another woman, while her insides were failing.

The anaesthesia was creeping up her body slowly, like rising water, and her last conscious thought was not of Ethan or even Vivienne. It was of a phone number, one she'd committed to memory ten years ago, and never had reason to use, that she could still recall with perfect accuracy.

Tomorrow, she determined. When I wake up.

I will make a call.

Three floors above her, in a hushed, sterile waiting room that reeked faintly of stale air and awful coffee, a man sat with his jacket still on, his phone turned facedown on the chair beside him. He had been in there since 8:08. He hadn't told anyone that he was on his way. He hadn't announced himself at the nurses' station. He had simply located the floor, located the waiting room, sat down, and was now staring at the middle distance with the determined stillness of someone exerting maximum energy to seem completely immobile.

The surgeon eventually came out at 12:34am and said Mrs. Ashford was fine. The operation had been smooth and there were no complications. Ethan Ashford nodded once, slowly. Like the words had travelled an enormous distance to reach him. Thank you, he said. Ethan stood up. He adjusted his jacket and turned up his collar.

In his drafts folder on his phone was a three word text that he'd written then deleted four times on the drive to the hospital.

I'm here. Sorry.

He'd never sent it. Not then, not now. He walked toward the elevator instead and pushed the button, then he stood there, watching the numbers climb as his jaw tightened then went slack at the sides and he looked like a man who had suddenly remembered something, but hadn't the faintest idea whether it was too late or not.

The elevator doors dinged and opened. He walked into the elevator.

Just down the hall, beyond a closed door, his wife was sleeping with a secret in her chest that was far more dangerous than anything Ethan had ever closed a deal on. He had no idea.