His First Love, My Last Goodbye novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Anniversary
On their third anniversary Esme learns she has stage-four cancer, then finds her husband leaving to meet the first love whose photo is in his wallet; she says nothing and ends the night by hiring a divorce lawyer.
Dr. Kimball said it in one sentence, because Esme had asked him to.
"It's stage four, and it's in your liver."
She sat across his desk with her hands in the pockets of her green cardigan.
Her scrub top was printed with cartoon otters.
"How long?" she asked.
"With treatment, six to nine months. Without it, less."
Ezra Kimball took off his reading glasses and let them hang on their cord.
He had taught her to read a chart on 6 West when she was twenty-three and afraid of IV lines.
In six years he had never lied to her.
"Tell me what you need," he said.
"A cake," Esme said. "It's my anniversary."
She bought it on the way home, a small lemon one from the bakery on Newbury Street.
The girl at the counter asked if it was a birthday.
"Third anniversary," Esme said, and her voice came out almost normal.
She carried the white box up the steps of the brownstone on Marlborough Street with both hands.
She had planned the whole speech on the walk.
She would put the cake on the table, light one candle, and say it before she lost her nerve.
The front door opened before she reached it.
Matthias stood in the hall in his charcoal coat, keys already in his hand.
He was thirty-three, tall and narrow, with pale blue eyes that never missed a number on a monitor.
They missed her face completely.
"There you are," he said. "I was about to text you."
"I need to talk to you."
"Clarissa's flight landed early." He was checking his watch. "She called from the runway. I told her I'd get her."
Esme stood very still on the top step.
She had known that name for three years.
His first love, the violinist who left him for Vienna at twenty-one and never wrote.
Now she was back in Boston, and she had called him from the runway.
"On our anniversary," Esme said.
"I'll make it up to you." He kissed her forehead, quickly, the way he did before surgery. "I won't be long. She's not well, Esme. She sounded awful."
He reached into his coat for his phone.
His wallet came out with it and hit the hall table, and it fell open.
A folded photograph slid halfway out of the plastic.
A girl in a red coat stood on a snowy bridge, laughing at whoever held the camera.
She was maybe twenty-one, with white-blond hair and a mouth painted dark red.
The paper was soft and gray along its creases.
Matthias snatched it up and shoved it back.
"That's old," he said. "I haven't looked at it in years."
"I know whose it is."
He looked at her then, finally, with the faint, patient frown he used on frightened families.
"Don't make this into something," he said. "Please. Not today."
She could feel the words in her mouth.
I was at Ezra's office this afternoon.
I have six months, Matthias, maybe nine.
Stay with me.
Behind him, in the kitchen, the magnet note on the fridge still said, in his square handwriting, "Matt: access panel, wk 42."
He lived by notes like that.
Everything he loved had a schedule.
She understood, standing there with a cake box going soft in her hands, what would happen if she said it.
He would stay.
He would cancel the airport, and sit beside her, and be the best doctor in Boston about her disease.
And every minute of it he would be looking at his watch for the girl in the red coat, and hating himself for it, and being kind.
She had watched him be kind to frightened families for three years.
She knew exactly what it cost him and what it was worth.
"Go," Esme said.
"Esme."
"She's waiting on a curb with a violin. Go and get her."
He hesitated for one second.
Then his phone buzzed in his hand, and he looked down at it, and the second was over.
"Thank you," he said. "I mean it. You're the most understanding person I know."
The door closed behind him.
She put the cake on the table and lit the candle.
She did not make a wish.
She ate a slice standing up, and it tasted of nothing at all.
At two in the morning the bed beside her was still smooth.
Her phone lit up the dark.
"Staying at the hotel with Clarissa. She's really not well. Don't wait up."
Esme read it once.
Then she got up, took her laptop to the kitchen table, and opened a blank email to a family lawyer whose name she had found in ten minutes.
She typed three lines and sent them before she could think.
"I need a divorce drafted this week. He is to be told nothing about why. I will pay whatever it costs."
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