He pointed to my chest. “Your scar,” he said.
I nodded.
“I just had a stent put in my heart,” I said. “That’s why I was atthe hospital. I have no idea what the future holds, Hugo, but for the past eight years, it hasn’t looked very good.”
Hugo looked at me. Not in horror, exactly, but in bewilderment. Like I was a stranger. Like he was trying to remember my full name. I felt my hands go numb and cold.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shook my head. “I had no idea how to say what I just did to you.”
Hugo nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Shit. Daphne.” He shifted his body weight from one foot to the other. He looked at me, then up at my door.
I felt him wanting to run, and that suggestion of movement, that longing to disengage, broke my fucking heart.
“I don’t know what to say.”
The almighty Hugo was speechless, because he couldn’t deal with this. Of course he couldn’t. It’s too big for anyone; that’s why I tell no one.
Three months.
I felt the fluttering in my chest, the emotion rising from my shitty, fucked-up heart to my throat.
“I think this has to end,” I told him.
Hugo snapped his gaze to mine. “No way,” he said. “Did I say that? That is not what I want. I’m just trying to wrap my head around—”
“It’s fine,” I said. “You should go.”
“Daphne, stop. Let’s talk about this. You just came at me with a lot of information. I want to talk about it. I want to understand.”
“Hugo,” I said, “there’s nothing to talk about.”
He fought me on it. He said he just needed some time, thathe wanted to figure out how to be there for me, with me. But as much as I was afraid of losing him, the thought of him being with me out of pity was impossible. I couldn’t bear that I’d have him and always know, somewhere, that he had signed up for someone healthy, and what he got was me.
“Why are you doing this?” Hugo asked me. “We’re just getting started.”
“Because our time is up,” I said. I made a move to stand, Hugo came closer to me.
“Bullshit,” he said. “Says who?”
I do not know what prompted what happened next. I do not know if I was delirious or devastated or just hopped up on medication, but I told him. The thing I had never shared with a single other person on earth. Not my parents, not Kendra, not Irina, not the postman. I told him about the papers.
“I get pieces of paper that tell me exactly how long I’ll spend with a man, and our paper said three months. We’ve been together for three months today.”
He was quiet for a long time. I thought he was going to tell me I was crazy, or worse, try to humor me.Can I see them? Whose handwriting?But instead, for the first time since he’d gotten there, he sat down on the stone step next to me. He ran a hand over his forehead and kept it there.
“Christ,” he said.
I felt something tighten in my chest, down deep into the muscle. The heart doesn’t often hurt. The illness comes out in other ways. In the blue tint of hands and lips, in the shortness of breath, in the swelling of my legs, in the brain fog, too. And close, in the chest. But the heart itself rarely hurts. You rarely feel it at all.
“I wish I would have known,” he said.
“What?”
“That it was finite for you.”
I swallowed. I wanted to cry, but I thought if I did I might never stop.
