He tells me we married because we fell in love. “Madly, immediately.”
The what?
I keep my face arranged so as not to show my shock at that blatant lie.
“How long did we date before the wedding?” I ask.
“About four months.” He smiles at me with his whole heart in his eyes. “We didn’t want to wait.”
Apparently, there are two consummate liars in this marriage.
I nearly laugh out loud, in the ICU, at my husband lying to my face with the composure of a man who has never told anything but the truth.
Four months.
He didn’t want to wait.
What utter bullshit!
I was ten weeks pregnant when we got married, and he said, “Okay.I think we should get married,” like it was a sensible logistical decision, and I was so stupid and so in love that I heard it as “I love you.”
“We sound impulsive,” I remark.
“It’s not impulsive when it’s right.”
I look at him.
He looks back.
There it is again—that thing in his face that I cannot account for, that doesn’t fit the story I’ve been holding since I left our home, that sits in the register of real rather than performed. It makes me want to ask, “Which part is the lie? The conference room or this? Or both?”
Fox is truthful. He may prevaricate, talk around things, but outright lying was never his way. Apparently, it is now. Apparently, it’s mine now, too.
I let him take my hand in his as I slide into sleep.
The pills are extraordinary. Whatever they are giving me for the ribs and the head is doing genuinely impressive pharmaceutical work, and the consequence is that I keep falling asleep mid-thought, mid-sentence sometimes, dropping into unconsciousness the way you drop a glass—suddenly, without warning, with no graceful transition.
In practice, this means I have no reliable sense of time.
I sleep and wake and sleep again, and the room is sometimes light and sometimes dark.
Fox is always there.
Every single time I surface—groggy, disoriented, running my internal inventory of what I remember and what I’ve decided—he is in the chair next to my bed, or standing at the window, or speaking to a nurse in the doorway.
Always.
I wake up at what must be three in the morning. He’s asleep in the chair with his head tipped back and his arms folded, and my first thought, before I can stop it, is, “He looks terrible.”
My second thought is, “He hasn’t left. Oh God, does he mean it when he says?—”
My third thought is, “Get a grip, Lucy, you don’t know why he’s here and why he’s saying he loves you.”
I watch him sleep for longer than I should.
He looks younger this way, unmanaged, the composure gone soft with slumber and exhaustion.
He looks like the version I imagine exists underneath—the one I was always trying to get to, the one I caught in glimpses, the three-in-the-morning version who saidheyto a baby who didn’t stay.
