Then, after a long pause, she added, “She asked for you when they took her for the biopsy.”
I looked up sharply.
Linda’s eyes shone.
“She was half-conscious from the medication. She kept saying your name.”
The words hit me harder than anything she had said before.
“She doesn’t know she said it,” Linda continued. “I wasn’t going to tell you. But maybe you need to understand that her heart is more complicated than her anger.”
Then she walked back toward Sophie’s room, leaving me alone beneath the buzzing hospital lights.
That night, I didn’t go home right away.
I sat in my car in the hospital parking garage, gripping the steering wheel.
For the first time since the divorce, I let myself remember our marriage without editing out the good parts.
Sophie dancing barefoot in our first apartment because the radio played her favorite song.
Sophie crying when we assembled a crib too early, then laughing because I had attached one side backward.
Sophie standing in the kitchen with flour on her cheek, insisting that pancakes counted as dinner.
Sophie asleep on the couch, one hand resting on her stomach during those brief weeks when we believed the future was arriving.
I had loved her.
I still loved her.
But love alone had not made me brave.
The following days became a quiet lesson in showing up.
I helped Linda coordinate appointments. I drove to Sophie’s apartment to collect clothes and discovered how small her new life had become. A one-bedroom unit with moving boxes still stacked against the wall. A plant dying on the windowsill. Bills arranged neatly beside a half-finished cup of tea.
On her nightstand was a framed photo I recognized immediately.
Our wedding day.
Sophie had not removed it.
She had turned it facedown.
I stood there for a long moment, staring at the back of the frame.
Then I gently left it exactly as I found it.
In the top drawer, while looking for the charger she had requested, I found a sealed envelope with my name on it.
Ethan.
My heart began to pound.
For several seconds, I held it in my hand, tempted by the weight of it.
Then I placed it back.
Whatever was inside belonged to Sophie until she chose otherwise.
When I returned to the hospital with her things, she noticed something in my face.
