And then he said the thing that made me put the lunch box down on a step.
He said: he asked me not to. In the April. He came in and he asked me not to tell anybody, in case it got back to you.
There is a second thing about that department that I found out later and that nobody at that hospital has said out loud.
Everybody knew.
Not about the warehouse. About the suspension.
Twenty people in that corridor, and a good half of them had known since the spring that Soren was not working there.
And for eleven months, not one of them rang me. Not one of them stopped me in a supermarket. Nobody’s wife sent a message.
That is not cruelty and I have stopped reading it as cruelty. It is the same thing every time.
Everybody assumed somebody closer had already done it.
The nurse whose christening I went to told me in the August that she had picked up her phone twice.
She said: and then I thought, well, she’ll know. She’s his wife.
PART 5
Now, the reason my husband did not tell me.
In 2019 there was a fundraiser at that hospital and they asked me, as a spouse, to stand up and say a few words.
And I did.
I said that I had shared him with this place for eleven years, and that I would do it all again, because that is who he is.
The whole room applauded. There is a photograph of it. It was on a wall in the atrium for about two years and I walked past it that Tuesday on my way in.
I want to put down what I actually said, because I have had to look it up on a recording and it is worse than I remembered.
I said: I don’t mind the empty chair.
I said it as a joke and the room laughed and then went soft, the way rooms do.
I don’t mind the empty chair.
Four years later he was sitting in a car park at Brackley Cross at half past ten at night, and the reason he could not ring me was that I had told three hundred people I did not mind.
