She Played Daughter-in-Law on a Pig Farm, So I Took Her Hospital novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Like
Nolan sees his wife in an assistant's holiday post, leaves a like and a barb, and finds out the village was told she is a widow.
Three nurses held their phones out to me at the same moment.
We were in the fourth-floor lounge of the hospital where I work, and the staff lunch was half eaten on the counter.
The video was short and it was my wife.
Veronica stood in a barn doorway in a stained canvas apron, with a knife in one hand and her hair tied up in a scarf.
Behind her on a steel table lay a pig, and her forearms were red to the elbow.
She was laughing at something off camera.
I had not seen her laugh like that in two years.
Her assistant had posted it.
The caption said his dad was thrilled to have a daughter-in-law who was a surgeon, and that she was somehow just as good with pigs.
"Nolan," said the nurse closest to me. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," I said.
"She told the whole third floor she was stuck in operations until New Year's," said the second nurse.
"She told me the same thing this morning," I said. "A year-end audit that couldn't wait."
I had driven to my mother's house in Maine alone for three Christmases running.
This year I had packed one suitcase instead of two, and I had not asked why.
The ER chief had been leaning against the coffee machine, saying nothing.
Her name was Morven MacDonough, and she kept spare scrubs in her car and her opinions in her pocket.
She took my coffee cup out of my hand and put a fresh one in it.
"You can look at it all you want," she said. "Just don't answer it angry."
"I'm not angry."
"That's what scares me."
I opened Cody Frawley's post and tapped the heart.
Then I opened the comments and typed with my thumb.
That's her major, after all.
Veronica had an Animal Science degree from a state agricultural college.
She had grown up on a hog farm in upstate New York, and she had told me so on our second date, with a laugh in her voice.
Somewhere in the last two years she had stopped telling people that.
The nurses leaned in to read what I had written.
"Oh, he's going to fight her," the first nurse whispered to the second.
"He's going to have a stroke," the second one whispered back.
Group chats started buzzing all over the room.
By the time I reached my office, four people had texted me a heart, a crying face or a screenshot.
None of them were from Veronica.
I stood at the window and looked down at the front of the hospital.
The lobby had a bronze plaque beside the doors, set there by the founding family a hundred years ago.
It said Eastbrook Memorial Hospital.
My mother, Adele, had been born an Eastbrook.
Veronica walked under that plaque every morning, and in nine years she had never once asked me about it.
My phone rang.
It was her.
I let it ring three times, then answered.
"Nolan, I know what you're going to say," she said.
Her voice was clipped, the way it got when a meeting ran over.
"You haven't heard me say anything yet."
"Cody's family insisted. The whole village does a pig roast before the holidays, and his father is a volunteer fire chief, and it would have been rude."
"Rude," I said.
"Don't turn this into a thing, please."
"Okay."
There was a short silence on the line.
I think she had been ready for a fight, and she did not know where to put the energy.
"Okay?" she said.
"Go to your party," I said. "I'll tell my parents you're sorry."
"That's all?"
"That's all."
"Thank you," she said, and I heard the relief in it.
She hung up before I could say goodbye.
I pulled up the post again, because the comments had moved.
A man named Dale Frawley had replied under mine.
His profile picture was a seed-company cap and a brown pig with a ribbon.
He had written:
Who is Nolan? Veronica told us she was a widow.
I read it once.
I did not need to read it twice.
For nine years I had been a man at home, waiting for her to finish a quarter.
I had done her taxes, and I had stood next to her at four galas where she accepted credit for what other people built.
Now there was a village an hour south that had buried me.
I took my coat off the hook.
I told my secretary to cancel the afternoon.
The ER chief was waiting at the elevator with her car keys in her hand.
"Where are you going?" Morven asked.
"To the roast," I said. "I'm told I'm dead."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend