I went to surprise my husband at the hospital with his lunch. His colleague looked at me with tears in his eyes and said: “He hasn’t told you anything, has he?”
Soren and I had been married eleven years, and I had spent every one of them sharing him with that hospital.
He is a gifted surgeon. I was proud that my husband saved lives for a living, and I have said that sentence at about forty dinner parties in a particular voice.
But over the past year I had started wrapping his dinner before I even sat down to eat my own.
There is a specific moment I keep. Standing at the counter with cling film in one hand at twenty past seven, before I had touched my own plate, because I already knew.
He missed Thanksgiving. He missed our anniversary, the twelfth, which he has never missed.
He missed our daughter’s eighth birthday, and she asked me at bedtime whether Daddy had forgotten or whether somebody was very ill.
I said somebody was very ill.
She thought about that for a bit and then she said: that’s all right then.
Eight years old, and she took the answer and put it away and went to sleep, because that is what we had trained her to do with that answer.
Some nights he did not come home at all.
We’re short-staffed, love. Don’t wait up.
And whenever he finally got into bed he looked so wrecked that I swallowed every single thing I had been saving up all week.
Once I woke at about three and he was sitting on the edge of the mattress with his back to me, and his shoulders were going.
I said: Soren?
He wiped his face before he turned round. I remember the sound of it, his palm on his face, before I saw anything.
He said: rough night. Go back to sleep.
And I did.
I want that on the page early, because everything else in this is built on it. I said his name once, I got four words back, and I went to sleep.
My name is Wynne and I am thirty-nine and I teach year four at a primary school about a mile from our house.
