Chapter 5: Sunday

By Sunday I knew my own body better than I ever had alive.

It lay in bed six of the ICU with a tube in its mouth and a clip on its finger.

The nurses had brushed its hair.

Every morning at seven, Abel came in carrying two coffees.

He drank one and set the other on the windowsill, steaming, for me.

"Black, no sugar," he said on the third day. "I guessed."

"I take cream," I said.

"I'll remember that."

He sat in the plastic chair and told the bed what the weather was doing and which of his customers had been the most difficult that week.

I stood beside him, because I had to, and listened to every word.

By Sunday I was waiting for it.

At nine, a nurse came to the door.

"The family meeting is ready."

The family room was thirty feet down the hall, a small beige room with a box of tissues on every surface.

Abel followed the nurse, and I followed Abel, and nobody else had to know that the cold in the room was mine.

Keegan sat on the couch with Imogen beside him.

She wore a black dress, though no one had died.

A doctor sat across from them with a folder on his knee, and a social worker beside him wrote on a pad.

"I asked Mr. Quincy to be here," the doctor said. "He performed the resuscitation."

"I know what he did," Keegan said, and didn't look at him.

The doctor opened his folder.

"Mrs. Winslow's scans show active brain function. Her EEG changes when we speak to her. Yesterday her fingers moved on her own."

"Reflexes," Imogen said gently.

"Possibly," the doctor said. "But I'd recommend waiting at least two more weeks before any decision."

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Died the Day My Husband's Girlfriend Did a Magic Trick from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.