Chapter 2

Before leaving for dinner on Friday, I tried on two outfits in front of the mirror. My old favorite dress was tight across my abdomen, so I had to unzip it as soon as I'd zipped it up. I settled on a loose jacket and packed spare ostomy supplies and a lightweight dress in my bag.

Meg waited by the door without rushing me. Her gaze stayed on my trembling hand braced against the dresser.

"I'll only stay a short while," I told her. "The moment it gets bad, we go."

"Then don't push yourself." She zipped my bag shut. "You want to see him, and I won't stand in your way. But don't sit there in pain just to stay a few minutes longer."

...

When we got to the inn, the table was already set. I knew everyone sitting around it. During the busy season, we'd washed mountains of glasses together in the early hours and crouched by the kitchen's back door, sharing the bread that hadn't sold.

Ethan, the man I loved, was part of every one of those memories.

He pulled out the chair beside him for me. "Take your jacket off. It isn't cold in here."

I shook my head, keeping one hand pressed against my hem. He glanced at my hand but didn't push. He just moved the water glass within easy reach.

Someone teased, "All of us in one room again. The inn changes hands soon. The two of you should have time to get away somewhere."

I was about to answer when Ethan poured me half a glass of wine.

"We don't often get everyone together. Let's eat first."

"I'm on medication. I can't drink."

"Water, then." He took the wine away, pushed a plate of fish in front of me, and bent over it, picking out the bones.

He even remembered to scrape away the layer of fat I disliked under the skin. Looking at the fish he'd prepared for me, I felt some of the tension ease in my back.

Someone asked how I had been, and I said I was resting at home. I asked Frank Ellis, our longtime cook, about his knee. He waved a hand and said he could finally have the surgery once the inn changed hands.

The conversation stayed easy until someone mentioned that Ethan had spent the past two years at the inn. Helen Walker had tried several times to get him to come home, but he wouldn't go.

"What am I even staying for?" Ethan glanced at me. "Someone has to wait."

People around the table laughed and said that now I was back, things would finally get easier for him.

Ethan lifted his water glass and leaned toward me. "I've waited two whole years. Can you at least tell me you regret it?"

I froze with the fork in my hand. "Ethan, we agreed this was just dinner."

"I'm not saying anything else." His eyes stayed on me. "One sentence. Is that so hard?"

I put the fork down and looked up at him. "I'm not getting back together with you."

The others stopped laughing and raised their water glasses to hide their discomfort. Ethan slammed his glass onto the table. The sharp clack cut through the silence.

"I looked after your father. I kept this inn running. I did everything I could to give you what you needed. And now I'm the bad guy for wanting my own wife back?"

Someone beside him spoke softly, trying to change the subject. Ethan ignored them and demanded to know whether I was going to pretend our years together meant nothing.

I held my glass without drinking. In the early days after my father's stroke, Ethan had been nothing like the man beside me now.

We cleared out a ground-floor room at the inn so a wheelchair could get in and out. I bought a rail for the bed. Ethan moved a kitchen cabinet that was in the way and said my father would be safer down there than upstairs.

Back then, I worked the front desk by day and cared for my father at night. Ethan always left me a hot meal when he finished in the kitchen. Several times, I fell asleep in my chair while eating and woke to find that my father had already been given his medicine.

I was grateful to him then, and I loved him deeply.

But as the inn grew busier, my father's calls often came during the dinner rush. Ethan would look irritated. If the wheelchair was in the hallway, he complained that it blocked the way. If I went upstairs for medicine, he demanded to know who was watching the front desk. I tried to time things better, but I couldn't predict when my father would feel unwell.

Before one banquet, my father wet himself. He sat in his room with his hand on the call bell for a long time, but in the end, he didn't press it.

When I opened the door, the first thing he did was apologize. He asked for a towel so he could clean himself up. But he couldn't even manage a button with his right hand.

I rushed to the kitchen and asked Ethan to cover for me for ten minutes. Helen was helping plate the food. She frowned and pointed out that all the guests had arrived.

"Ten minutes," I said. "His clothes are soaked through."

Ethan slammed a plate down. "Ten minutes again. Claire, it's always the same excuse."

I brought him clean clothes, washed and changed him, and wheeled him to the sitting room. As we passed the kitchen, I heard every word being said inside.

"What am I to her—a husband or an aide she hired for her father?"

Helen sighed and told him not to say those things where I could hear them. I didn't listen to the rest. My father sat in his wheelchair with both hands in his lap, his head slowly sinking toward his chest.

The next day, my father suggested moving into a nursing home.

"There are people there to talk to. It's better than being shut in a room alone." He smiled to make it easier on me. "When the two of you aren't busy, I can come back and sit awhile."

I said we could hire an aide to come to the house, or take on fewer banquets. All he wanted to know was whether family could visit on weekends.

I went to talk to Ethan about it.

"Your father wants to go," he said. "Why do you have to run everyone ragged?"

I stopped arguing. When we moved him in, I put away his belongings and showed him where to find the call bell, lamp, and water glass. Then I crouched beside him and asked if he wanted me to bring the wooden chair.

My father patted my shoulder. "Leave the chair at the inn. It belongs in your home."

My eyes filled.

He said he was only changing addresses and told me not to cry. On the drive back, I kept running my fingers over my cuff and didn't look at Ethan beside me.

Months later, my father called and asked to come home for one night.

Over the phone, he told me he'd been sitting in the sun when he remembered the flowers on the steps by the inn's back door. Were they still blooming? I told him they were. He laughed happily and said he wanted to come and see them.

Of all nights, the inn was hosting a large banquet that evening, and Ethan had told me that morning to be on the floor the whole evening. I stood in the kitchen doorway with the phone in my hand and told him my father wanted to come home.

"Get him tomorrow." He didn't look up. "We can't manage tonight without you. I'll drive first thing in the morning. All right?"

I looked at the guests already seated in the dining room and nodded.

Not long afterward, my father called again to ask what time he could come home the next day. I held the phone against my ear while carrying soup. Behind me, a server urged me to reset a table.

"Dad, I really can't get away tonight." The words came faster than I meant them to. "Don't call again. I'll come in the morning."

There were a few seconds of quiet on the line.

"All right. Go and do your work. Remember to eat."

I murmured an answer, hung up in a hurry, and slipped the phone into my pocket. It was the last time I heard my father's voice while he was still lucid.

Late that night, the nursing home called. My father had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. I dropped my glass and ran outside. Ethan drove, and from the passenger seat I begged him again and again to go faster.

We were too late. My father never opened his eyes again.

A nurse handed me a travel bag. He had packed it early that evening, certain I would come for him the next day. Inside were a clean shirt and a pair of slippers. On top, in a clear bag, were two pieces of fruit in case I was too busy to eat.

I held that bag until the sky went gray. Nobody told me that getting there sooner would have saved him. But that hurried "Don't call again" lodged in me like a splinter.

If I hadn't hung up in such a hurry, would he have told me something more?

After the funeral, Ethan helped me through the days and turned down invitations for me. I knew he was exhausted too. At night, I didn't dare turn on a light. I often hid in the bathroom until I'd stopped crying.

Once, he heard me anyway. He knocked on the door and said the worst had already happened. I shouldn't use it to punish the living. I sat on the cold floor with my arms around my knees and told him I wasn't blaming him.

"Then what is it you want from me?"

I had no answer. He leaned against the door, and after a long time, he said the dead were gone and we had to start living again.

A few days later, I asked for a divorce.

At first, he thought it was just the grief talking. Later, he called me ungrateful. Every time my father came up, he listed how many sheets he'd changed and how many times he'd lifted that wheelchair. Then he asked whether my grief gave me the right to drag everyone down with me.

He had his own career. He needed time for himself. He'd done the best he could!

I understood. But every argument cut into me like a knife, and the ache in my chest came in waves. The more I loved him, the more helpless, hurt, and disappointed I felt as I faced what our lives had become.

I couldn't bear to hear the man I loved speak to me so cruelly. And I couldn't bear to see our love destroyed by the pressures of everyday life.

In the end, when I tried once more to tell him I loved him, he had no patience left for it, so I stopped talking.

The warm, easygoing, gentle man I remembered seemed to be gone.

Back at the dinner, he pushed the water glass closer to me again.

"Tell me, was there a single day your father lived here that I didn't do everything I could for him?"

I let go of the glass, now warm from my hand.

"I've never forgotten what you did for him." I met his eyes. "But my father and I both heard what you said in the kitchen."

Frank put his head down and folded his napkin slowly.

"So now you're saying I forced you to send your father away?"

"I'm trying to explain why we got divorced. You keep telling people I just disappeared, but I tried to talk to you about it over and over."

I didn't want to keep arguing in front of old friends while he decided how long I was allowed to grieve.

"So you don't regret any of it?" he asked.

I shook my head. "I don't regret the divorce."

Whether it was because I had so little time left, or because the past still hurt every time I thought of it, I had never been surer that leaving was right.

Ethan's mouth tightened. Then I felt something cold and wet against my side. I touched the spot through my dress, and my heart sank. My ostomy pouch was leaking. I had to deal with it immediately.

I pulled the jacket closed, pushed myself to my feet, and said quietly that I was going to the restroom. The chair scraped back, and Ethan grabbed my wrist.

"This again? The second you hear something you don't like, you walk out on everyone."

"I'm not leaving. I'm going to the restroom."

"We're not done talking."

His fingers kept tightening. I didn't dare pull too hard. The pressure would make the leak worse. Every eye at that table was on me. Someone told him to let it go. Someone else told me to sit back down and not ruin the dinner.

The dampness was spreading down my dress, and my palms had gone cold.

"Ethan, let go."

"Tell me what you came here for tonight."

"Please." I could barely lift my head. "I really do have to go to the restroom."

He stared at my face, and then, slowly, he let go.

I wrapped the jacket as far around me as it would go and steadied myself. Behind me, someone wondered if the wine had upset my stomach. Another voice said I hadn't touched any. I didn't turn around.

I shut the restroom door and leaned against the counter, gasping. When I lifted my hem, I saw that my clothes were soiled, even my underwear.

I took out my spare supplies and opened the packaging, but the box slipped out of my hands. Bracing myself against the counter, I bent to pick it up. Pain shot through my abdomen and forced me upright. I reached for a tissue, and that box fell too. I stared helplessly at everything scattered across the floor.

When my father had wet himself and hadn't dared ring the bell, I'd told him there was nothing to be ashamed of. I'd stood at his door with clean clothes in my arms, certain that every minute of delay was another minute of suffering for him.

Now I was the one shut in a small room, afraid of the smell, afraid of being asked about it, afraid of one tired sigh from somebody else.

I texted Meg, "Can you come in and help me?"

She got there fast, asked the staff where the restroom was, and said my name quietly through the door. My hands shook as I turned the lock. The second she was inside, she took off her own coat and put it around me.

"Sit down first."

"There are things on the floor. I can't pick them up."

"I see them. Don't bend down."

She cleaned me up, changed all my ostomy supplies, and carefully checked the skin around the stoma. The soiled dress and underwear went into a sealed bag. With one hand on her shoulder, I changed into the lightweight dress I had brought. In the mirror, my face was deathly pale.

"I'm sorry."

Meg stopped straightening my hem.

"You don't have to apologize to me for this, sweetheart."

I nodded, but my tears splashed onto the back of her hand. I wiped at them and more came. In the end, I pressed my face against her shoulder and cried silently for a while.

Once I'd calmed down, she asked whether I wanted to go straight home. I said yes.

We went out through the inn's back door, and Ethan came after us. When he saw Meg holding me up, his voice dropped, and he asked what was wrong and whether he should drive me.

"I have a ride," I said.

He reached for my bag and I held on to it. The soiled clothes were inside, and I didn't want him seeing them.

His hand froze in midair, then slowly fell to his side.

"Saturday... come for the soup. I won't say anything I shouldn't...

"Who else is going to take care of you? I don't trust anyone else to look after you," he said, faster now. "I swear I'll be with you every day. I won't..."

I knew what was coming next. He wouldn't let what had happened to my father happen to me.

But he didn't understand that what had broken us went deeper than that.

Meg looked at me. I knew I should say goodbye, go home, and rest instead of wearing myself out by seeing him again.

But then I thought of that small kitchen door at the back of the inn. On all those nights I'd come in late, he'd known I hadn't eaten without my having to say a word.

Maybe it was because I was dying. The warmth of those memories drew me back like a drug.

"Come to the place I'm renting," I said at last. "Just the two of us."

He looked at me and agreed. "I'll cook. Wait for me at home."

I gave him my address, and we agreed on five o'clock on Saturday afternoon. I asked him to come a little earlier if he could. Only after he promised did I leave with Meg.

Meg said nothing as we drove back. I looked at her hands on the wheel and finally broke the silence. "I still want to see him."

She glanced at me, then looked back at the road.

"Claire, he's the one who left you like this."

"I know." I pressed down on the clothes covering my lap. After a long pause, I said, "But I can't bear the thought of never seeing him again."

She pulled up outside my building and unbuckled my seat belt for me. I held on to her arm as I got out. I didn't force myself to walk even that short distance alone.