“It was horrible,” she finally said. “Humiliating and…”
This time, he filled in the word, so she didn’t have to. “Heartbreaking.”
Another nod.
He sank into his own chair, stunned by her unprompted admission. By the way she’d just tilted up her chin, bared that pale neck to him, and waited to find out whether he’d cut it.
This wasn’t an iteration of Candy he’d met before.
This was the river beneath her boulders. Swift and deep. Full of beauty. Teeming with terrors.
Deliberately, he leaned forward from across Candy’s desk and laid his hands flat between them. “Did it make you wonder whether you were losing your grip on reality?”
She cringed away from him, and it was unbearable. He hated it.Hatedit.
He would never mock her. Never use such an intimate, painful confession against her. She didn’t know that yet, but she would. He would make certain of it, starting now.
“My wife, Marianne, died three years ago,” he said.
Candy swayed in his direction once more, her stricken wince gone. Instead, her expression had become as open and unguarded as he’d ever seen it. Sad again, this time for his sake.
“Oh, Griff.” She spoke so softly, he had to read her lips.
“Brain aneurysm. Totally unexpected.” The words were abrupt and hoarse, but he couldn’t help that. He didn’t talk about his grief to anyone who didn’t already share it. Marianne’s family, mostly. Maybe if he did, he could discuss it more easily.
Instead, the story clawed at his throat, unwilling to emerge. He forced it out anyway.
“She had a terrible headache all day, but we thought it was just the stress of the holidays.” One final opportunity for intervention—for life—lost, though neither of them had known it. “She died sometime during the night. When I woke up the next morning, she was already gone.”
The horror of that awakening, Candy didn’t need to hear about. Not now, anyway. Sharing that particular experience wasn’t the point of his revelation.
“For months afterward, I saw her everywhere.”Thiswas the point. The reassurance that Candy wasn’t experiencing anything unusual, anything that should embarrass her, anything that indicated acute mental instability, at least not by itself. “At gas stations. In the cars ahead of me at drive-throughs. At school. In malls and doctors’ offices and sometimes even in our house. In our bed.”
Candy’s utter stillness, her sympathetic silence, allowed him to keep going, keep baring himself in the hopes she might recognize herself in his nakedness.
“It felt like being haunted. I thought I might be, uh, losing my faculties.” When he forced out a dry, strangled sort of laugh, Candy’s good hand covered his. Broad, strong, sheltering. “But the grief counselor said it was common. That for most people, those moments would eventually diminish, and then disappear entirely.”
Her deep green cast seemed to absorb the sunlight beaming through her classroom windows, the color as warm and comforting as her hand on his. And beneath that fiberglass, her broken ulna was healing. Quickly, he hoped.
The clean fracture they’d both seen on the emergency room x-ray would cease to exist at some point. Maybe evidence of the damage would appear on future x-rays, or in a marrow-deep ache on rainy days, but maybe not. Her acute pain would become a mere memory, and they’d both welcome its retreat into the past. He certainly didn’t want her to hurt any longer than necessary.
He didn’t want her to hurt at all, but that wasn’t an option.
Why couldn’t he seem to feel the same about his own fracture, his own pain? Why couldn’t he greet his own healing with uncomplicated relief?
Her voice was loud enough for him to hear, but gentle. So gentle. “Did you stop seeing your wife at some point?”
“After a few months.”
At first, he went a few days in between sightings. Then weeks.
Then, without him noticing, she’d slipped away entirely. Again.
“Was that a good thing? Or—” Candy bit her lip and thought for a moment. “Or did you miss that moment of possibility? The sense that she might be close, despite everything?”
So incisive. Like a surgeon, she’d sliced directly to his heart, bound in scars but frantically beating despite the damage.
“Those moments wrecked me.” The bright burst of hope was never, ever worth the darkness afterward. “But when they were gone, when I didn’t see her anywhere outside memories and photos anymore, I—”
