“Does she want to see me?”
The nurse paused.
That pause told me everything.
“She knows you’re here,” she said.
“She didn’t ask you to leave.”
For Claire, that was not forgiveness.
It was barely permission.
I accepted it.
The room was dim except for the lights above the monitors.
Claire looked smaller than I remembered.
There was no oxygen mask now, only tubing beneath her nose and wires disappearing beneath the hospital blanket.
I stopped just inside the door.
Her eyes opened.
For several seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then she said, “You look terrible.”
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
It sounded broken.
“You nearly died, and you’re criticizing me?”
“Someone should.”
There she was.
Claire.
Even exhausted, even pale, she could still cut through me with six words.
I moved toward the chair beside her bed but didn’t sit until she gave the smallest nod.
“He’s alive,” I said.
Her eyes filled instantly.
“You saw him?”
“No.
They told me.
He’s being monitored.”
Claire closed her eyes.
One tear slipped toward her ear.
“Okay,” she whispered.
“Okay.”
I waited.
Then I asked the question that had been tearing through me for hours.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her eyes opened again.
“Tell you what?”
“That you were pregnant.”
She looked at me as if the answer should have been obvious.
“You told me I was a mistake.”
I lowered my eyes.
“I lied.”
“I know that now.”
My head came up.
Claire watched me steadily.
“I didn’t know it then,” she continued.
“I believed you.
For weeks, I believed every word.
Then I realized something didn’t make sense.
You spent a year checking every lock twice, sending someone to walk me home, changing my schedule whenever anything felt wrong.
Then overnight you suddenly didn’t care whether I existed?”
I said nothing.
“I figured out that you were scared,” she said.
“I just didn’t know of what.”
“Someone had noticed you.”
