That's the part that scares me.
Not the lie. The way the lie is starting to fit. The way my mouth has said it twice now and neither time felt wrong enough to take back.
The corridor is doingthat thing that corridors do toward six — emptying out, filling up with different sounds. Shift change starting to stir somewhere behind the walls. Somewhere down the hall, a vending machine hums a note that clashes with the fluorescent light. A nurse I haven't seen before walks past carrying two coffees and I want to mug her for one of them.
Then: the other nurse. The first one. Clipboard nurse. She rounds the corner and she's walking with purpose now, and my body reads her body language before my brain catches up — a fact changed.
"Mademoiselle?"
I'm already standing. My legs don't cooperate immediately — six hours of that chair have turned my knees into a bureaucratic process — and I sway for a second, grabbing the armrest of the plastic chair, which flexes in a way that inspires zero confidence.
"He's awake." She's almost smiling, or at least doing the medical-professional version of almost smiling, which involves a slight softening of the eyes and a clipboard angle that's two degrees less defensive. "He's been asking for you."
He's been asking for you.
Five words. I should be relieved. I am relieved. Somewhere under the exhaustion and the dying phone and the dark smear on my sleeve and the wordgirlfriendstill echoing around inside my ribcage, there is relief.
But there's also this:
He's asking forme.Whatever version of me he thinks is sitting out here. The girlfriend. The one who has it together. The one who called his mother and handled the paperwork and stayed all night.
He doesn't know I lied about what I am to him.
He doesn't know I'm not sure it's a lie.
And here's the thought I can't stop: did she say it? When she went back to check on him, did the nurse sayyour girlfriend is here?Did she use that word to his face, in his room, while he was lying there doped up and waiting for a surgery he doesn't even know the date of yet? Did he hear it?
Did he correct her?
My legs are awake now. The nurse is holding the door to his hallway open, waiting.
I imagine the room on the other side. The machines. The blankets. Him. Probably still foggy. Probably looking terrible. Probably — if the morphine is still working — looking at me like he looked at me when he gave me his password. That soft,confused,oh, you're still herelook that I'm going to have to deal with while standing next to his hospital bed pretending I belong there.
I walk.
The hallway is short. Twenty steps, maybe. The kind of distance you cover before you've decided whether you're ready.
His door is half open. The light inside is different — warmer, some lamp someone turned on, not the 4100K overhead of the corridor. I can hear a machine beeping in steady rhythm, and the sound is both terrible and the most reassuring thing I've heard all night because it means his heart is doing what hearts are supposed to do.
I push the door the rest of the way open.
I don't know what I am to him.
I said a word in a hallway and I meant it in a way I can't take apart yet, and now I'm walking into his room wearing his jacket and carrying no answers at all.
I go in anyway.
2
THE ALMOST-BOYFRIEND
The word I gave the nurse did not begin in that hallway.
Before the hospital, before the slope, before any of it — there was the pastry.
Specifically, areligieuse au caféfrom a place on Rue Saint-Denis whose name I can't spell and whose hours I can't predict, because it's run by a woman in her seventies who opens when she feels like it and closes when the pastries run out, which is sometimes noon and sometimes never. I mentioned it once. In a text. At 11:47 PM, in the middle of a conversation about whether Montreal's potholes qualify as a geological event, because that's the kind of thing we talked about — low-stakes, easy, the verbal equivalent of keeping your hands in your pockets.
Third date. He showed up with the pastry in a paper bag.
