I mention the job because it matters. I spend my entire working life watching eight-year-olds and knowing within four seconds which of them has had a bad morning.
I am extremely good at it. It is the thing I am best at.
And I could not do it in my own bedroom, at three in the morning, with a man I have known for fourteen years sitting two feet away with his back to me.
PART 2
So that Tuesday, after watching him leave with his hospital badge clipped to his pocket, I decided to surprise him.
I made the thing he likes, the one with the peppers. I put a slice of apple pie in a separate box so the pastry would not go soft.
And I tucked a note under the fork.
You don’t have to look after everybody. Let me have a turn.
I want to be honest about that lunch before I go any further, because it comes back later.
It was not only kindness.
I had been building a case for eleven months. I had the conversation written. I knew the order and I knew which line I was going to end on, and I had rehearsed it in the car about nine times.
And part of me wanted to stand in that corridor and actually see him being the man he kept telling me he was.
So that I could either forgive him properly, or finally be allowed to be angry.
I drove over imagining his face.
And the second I walked through those doors, something was wrong.
At the nurses’ station there was a woman I have known for six years — I went to her daughter’s christening — and she stopped smiling the moment she saw me.
I said: is Soren about? And please don’t warn him, he’ll only say I shouldn’t have bothered.
She glanced at the nurse next to her.
Neither of them said anything, and neither of them looked at me. They looked at each other.
My smile went.
I said: has something happened to him? Where is he?
