All Chapters of How I Met My Wife.: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Monday, 7:23 p.m.The text comes at 7:23 p.m. on a Monday.I am on the couch. I am in a hoodie. I am in the candle-lit apartment that I have been calling home for the last six weeks, except tonight the candle is not lit, because the candle is a thing I light when I am a person who is okay, and I am not a person who is okay tonight, because tonight is the night after a Sunday in which the entire world found out that I am dating a surgeon, and the entire world has been texting me about it, and my mother has called me four times, and Sophie has called me nine times, and I have not picked up any of it, because I have been lying on the couch in a hoodie watching a TV show I do not remember the name of, in the kind of silence that is not peace, that is the kind of silence that is a person who is waiting for the next shoe to drop.Then, the text.Come over. Now.-AThree words. Just three words. Come over. Now. The kind of text a man sends when a man needs a woman, and the woman is the woman

Friday, 10:14 a.m. The door slammed behind him. I stood there in my kitchen, holding a mug I didn’t remember picking up. The sound echoed. Too loud. Too final. Aiden was gone. He didn’t yell. He didn’t do the big dramatic thing. He just looked at me like I was a stranger and said, “You lied to me, Emma.” And then he walked out. My hands started shaking. The mug slipped. It didn’t shatter. It just hit the tile with a dull thud and rolled under the table. Like even it didn’t want to make a scene. I sank to the floor right there. Because it was true. I lied. Not about us. Not about the 405 or the hospital or the way he looked at me when he thought no one was watching. I lied about the TikTok. I lied about the money. For three weeks I’ve been posting videos. Not the ones where I talk about him. The ones where I talk about recovery, about almost dying, about learning to walk again. They blew up. Two point three million views. And brands started emailing me.

Saturday, 9:02 a.m.The phone rings four times before she picks up.I am sitting at a small kitchen table in a small Silverlake apartment, in a man's t-shirt, with a man in a hoodie on the other side of the table, with a small gray dog asleep under the table, with eggs in front of me, with coffee in my hand. I am a person who is about to have a conversation with her mother. I am a person who has been avoiding this conversation for four days. I am a person who is going to have it now, because the man across the table has just told me there is a kitchen with eggs in it, and the man across the table is in love with me, and the man across the table is going to be in the room when I have this conversation, and the man across the table is the kind of man I am going to be in love with for a long time.Emma. My mother's voice. The voice of a woman who has been worried for four days, in the small, careful way mothers worry, which is the kind of way that is louder than the internet, and is loud

Sunday, 7:14 p.m.The door is closed. David is on the other side of the door. I am on this side of the door, in a sweater, in mascara, in a house that smells like garlic and lemon and the kind of roast my mother has been making for six hours, in the way that mothers make roasts for six hours when mothers are trying to make a point.I do not open the door.David knocks. David is the kind of man who knocks, in the way that men knock when men have shown up at a door uninvited and the woman has closed the door and the man thinks the woman is going to open it.Emma. His voice. The voice I used to know. The voice I used to fall asleep to on a couch in a different apartment, in a different life, in the way that women fall asleep on couches with men who are going to leave them. Emma, please. I just want to talk.I do not say anything. I am a person who is standing behind a closed door, in a sweater, in mascara, in love with a man who is not David, in the way that women are in love with men wh

Monday, 9:14 a.m. I wait. Lincoln waits. The coffee goes cold. I do not call him. I do not text him. I do the small thing of a woman who is sitting on a couch with a sticky note and a small grey dog, in the way that women sit on couches with sticky notes and small grey dogs when men are at hospitals and the men have written do not come on a sticky note and the women are going to listen. Lincoln gets up. Lincoln looks at me. Lincoln does the small thing that small dogs do when small dogs need to go outside, in the way that small dogs need to go outside regardless of the small, very real emotional crisis happening in the apartment. Okay, I say to Lincoln. We walk. I put on my shoes. I put on a jacket. I clip the leash on Lincoln. We walk out of the apartment. We walk down the stairs. We walk into the small Silverlake afternoon, which is sunny and warm and smells the way Los Angeles smells in October when everything in a person's life is going well and the person has no idea it