Reborn: This Time, I'm Divorcing Him First novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: 4:17

"Not here," I said. "At home. With the door shut."

He waited the three hours until the machine let me go.

He sat in Maeve's plastic chair and didn't touch his phone once.

At eleven we climbed the three flights to our door.

He shut it behind us and turned the lock and stood with his back against it.

"Okay," he said. "It's shut."

I sat down at the kitchen table in my coat.

I'd thought about this moment a hundred times in three years.

In every version, I lost him.

"I've lived this year before," I said. "Not this one. A different one."

Then I told him.

He didn't interrupt me once.

When I stopped, the radiator ticked.

Ethan was still standing against the door.

His face hadn't moved.

"How old were you?" he asked finally.

That wasn't the question I'd braced for.

"Thirty-six."

"Thirty-six," he repeated.

He came away from the door and pulled out the chair across from me and sat.

"Where was I?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know."

"I never went back to work. I never saw you again after I quit. I think you took one of those other hospitals. I think you were happy."

"I would have come."

"You didn't know I was there."

"I'd have come anyway."

He said it was a fact about anatomy.

Then he asked the thing I hadn't let myself think about in three years.

"Who held your hand?"

My throat closed.

"Nobody."

He looked down at the table.

His jaw worked for a long time.

"You think I'm out of my mind," I said.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I watched you not blink at eight hundred thousand dollars."

He looked up.

His eyes were wet and angry and certain.

"I've waited three years for you to tell me why."

I put both hands over my face.

He came around the table and knelt on the kitchen floor and pulled my hands down and held them.

"Does anyone else know?"

"No. And nobody ever will."

"Okay."

"That's it? Okay?"

"It's four in the morning in that story," he said. "What time?"

"4:17."

He nodded slowly, like he was memorizing a dose.

"Then I'll be awake at 4:17."

At five the next morning I was back on bed nine with the machine humming.

At ten I did a triple bypass on a fireman from Staten Island.

My hands didn't care what had happened in that kitchen.

At noon I sat at my desk and filled out the form.

After any change in a surgeon's health, the patient safety committee gets an updated fitness report.

It goes to one inbox before Monday's meeting.

The chair's.

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