An hour earlier, I’d kissed Anthony’s forehead and said, “Don’t you dare make me flirt with your surgeon for updates.”
He’d smiled, tired but real. “Jealous at a time like this?”
“I can multitask.”
That was the last full sentence my husband ever heard from me.
An hour earlier, I’d kissed Anthony’s forehead.
Now, there was a pink pillow in my arms and a nurse looking at me like she knew something I didn’t.
“Unzip it when you’re alone,” Becca said softly. “You deserve that much.”
Then she stepped back and let me go.
***
I made it to my car on pure habit. I don’t remember the elevator, the lobby, or finding my keys. I only remember sitting behind the wheel with the pillow in my lap and my purse spilling receipts onto the passenger seat.
Anthony had been in the hospital for two weeks.
“Unzip it when you’re alone.”
Two weeks of test after test.
Two weeks of doctors using careful words and avoiding direct ones.
Two weeks of me visiting every single day, sitting beside him, holding his hand, talking about neighbors, grocery prices, the leaking faucet, and anything to make the room feel less like a place that was stealing him from me.
But he wasn’t himself. Sometimes he would just look at me with this strange, aching expression, like he was carrying something too heavy to say out loud.
But he wasn’t himself.
***
Three days ago, they told me he needed emergency surgery.
An hour ago, they told me he was gone.
Now, there was a zipper under my thumb.
“I hate you a little right now,” I whispered to the pillow.
Then I pulled it open. My fingers found envelopes first. A stack of them, tied with a blue ribbon from our kitchen junk drawer. Under them was something hard and small.
“I hate you a little right now.”
It was a beautiful velvet ring box.
