Nate has been with her? In all my horrible imaginings about other women, I never thought it could be Bea.
‘I’m his wife,’ I repeat to the doctor, who looks startled and then immediately a blankness falls over her features.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Do we need to sort out some identification?’ she asks.
‘I was just with Nate when he collapsed,’ Bea says. ‘Marin is his wife. I’ll leave now that she’s here.’
I don’t give her a second look, I only want to see Nate.
‘He is under sedation,’ the doctor tells me, matter of factly, as we walk back to the cubicle. I take Nate’s hand and hold it. None of this seems real. He’s hooked up to machines with the reassuring beep of the pulse, his chest a tangle of wires ready to connect him to the ECG machine. But there is nothing reassuring about this scene.
I can’t speak. My fingers keep stroking the cold part of Nate’s hand encumbered by oxygen monitors and wires.
‘I’ll get the cardiac consultant to talk to you in a little while, but we are slammed tonight, big traffic accident.’
I nod.
‘Is there anything more you can tell me?’ I find my voice.
‘No. Your husband is stable for now. It’s important we get him upstairs to the cath lab.’
‘OK.’ I take the news and nod, as if I’m used to hearing this every day. And then she’s gone, whisking out, pulling the curtain back into place. Bea has followed me in, and now the three of us are in the tiny narrow cubicle, Nate’s breathing even, the beep of the machines the only sound I’m taking in, although it’s chaotic outside.
She doesn’t leap in with excuses or lies. Instead she says, ‘Marin, there’s a chair, please sit.’
I don’t sit. ‘Get out.’
I can see her eyes fill with tears but I feel no pity.
I cannot work out which of them I hate most at this moment.
She slips quietly away and I’m alone in the cubicle with my husband, who isn’t really my husband, who’s only been pretending to be my husband. I look at his face, touch his brow, his nose, his lips and I lean over to kiss him on the forehead because I love him, he’s the father of my children. And then I allow myself to cry.
After a little while, an older doctor arrives along with the porters.
‘Mrs Stanley?’ I can tell that he knows Nate has come in with another woman: the look he gives me is pitying. ‘I’m Dr O’Donnell. We are moving your husband up to cardiac care where we’ll perform more tests. He may need an angiogram to see what the problem was; we need to keep him stable and you probably won’t be in with him for a little while. Do you want to go home?’
‘No, I’m going to stay.’
‘OK, go back out and someone will show you how to get up to coronary care and wait near the nurses’ station, and we can talk to you up there.’
‘Is he going to survive?’ I only have one question I need answered. ‘Is he going to be all right?’
‘I can’t say right now, we are doing our best. You have got to trust us.’
And, with that, the nurses and the porters organise my husband so his trolley can be wheeled away from me and I am led to the doors out of the emergency department.
I find coronary care on the fourth floor, although I am feeling weaker with every step closer to it.
Nate has had a heart attack. The words sound too serious, too dangerous, to apply to Nate.
And he’d been with Bea.
How could he do that? He loved me, he loved our children; none of it made any sense. I’d suspected Angie, hadon-and-off conversations in my head about confronting him, kept putting it off because I wanted to believe that Nate would never risk what we had. Would never have an affair, certainly not with his friend’s wife.
And all along, he had been doing just that. Except that the friend wasJean-Luc and the wife was Bea.
I have to sit in a littleante-room beside coronary care. I hold my phone in my hand, wondering who I can text to say, you won’t believe what’s happened. In hospitals, people ring family and friends so that these loved ones tell them it will all be OK. How can that happen here? Who could I ring?
