Still nothing.
And I was starting to get properly angry at how strangely they were behaving when I saw his colleague Cassian coming down the corridor towards me.
His face was completely white.
I said, brightly, because I still had no idea: oh, thank goodness. Can you tell me where Soren is?
He stopped in front of me and looked at my face for about three seconds, the way you look at somebody when you are deciding something.
And then, with no warning at all, his eyes filled.
He said: he hasn’t told you anything, has he?
And here is the thing I have not been able to explain to anybody since.
My first feeling was not fear. It was relief.
For about a second and a half, standing in that corridor with a lunch box, I thought: good. Finally. Here it is.
Because I had spent eleven months waiting to find out what it was, and any answer is easier to hold than the shape of a question.
I had a list. An actual list, in my head, in order, of what it might be.
Another woman was first. It had been first since about the June.
And what I have to sit with is that for eleven months I would have found another woman easier than the truth, because another woman is a thing that happens to marriages and you can be angry about it in public.
There is no version of my husband was suspended and worked nights in a warehouse and could not tell me that I get to be angry about in front of anybody.
I only get to be sad about it, and I only get to be sad about it because of the part I did.
That second and a half is the most shameful thing in this account and it is also the truest, and I have since been told by a woman on Wednesdays that almost everybody has it and almost nobody says it.
PART 3
My husband had not worked at that hospital since the March.
Eleven months.
The badge he clipped to his pocket every single morning, in front of me, at the kitchen door, had not opened a door in that building since the spring.
