CHAPTER 4 #2
Avery wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She looked young. So incredibly young. A child playing dress-up in a firefighter’s uniform.
"Because I saw the pictures," she said.
"What pictures?"
"In his locker," she said. "I was... I was putting a note in there. And I saw them. He usually keeps it closed. But it was open."
She looked at me, her eyes pleading for understanding I didn't have.
"There were photos of you. Of you two. At a beach somewhere. And you looked... happy. You didn't look like roommates. You didn't look like people who were drifting."
She took a breath.
"And I realized," she said quietly. "He wasn't leaving. He was never leaving. He was just... using me to stay."
Using me to stay.
The sentence hung in the air, vibrating. It was the truest thing anyone had said in this room in years.
"So I ended it," she said. "Yesterday. I told him I couldn't do it anymore. And I told him if he didn't tell you, I would."
She waited.
I looked at her. I looked at this girl who had been the escape hatch for the man I loved. She wasn't a monster. She wasn't a femme fatale. She was just a kid who had believed a liar.
She was me, five years ago. Believing that Declan Murphy was the safest place on earth.
"Thank you," I said.
The words felt foreign. Absurd. I was thanking the woman who had just detonated my life.
"Nora, I am so sorry," she started, moving toward me. "I didn't know—"
I held up a hand. "Stop."
She froze.
"Don't apologize," I said. "And don't come any closer."
I opened the door. The sounds of the ER rushed in—the beeping, the voices, the life. It sounded impossibly loud.
"You should go," I said.
She nodded. She wiped her face again. She looked like she wanted to say more, to explain, to beg for absolution. But my face must have been a stone wall, because she didn't try.
She walked past me. I smelled her perfume. Vanilla. And something else.
Smoke.
She smelled like the firehouse. She smelled like him.
I watched her walk down the corridor, past the nurses' station where I had sat ten minutes ago as a woman with a life, a partner, a future. She pushed through the automatic doors and disappeared into the night.
I stood in the doorway of the Quiet Room for a long time.
Helen walked by. She stopped. "Nora? You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost."
I looked at her. I looked at her badge. Helen. Charge Nurse.
"I'm fine," I said. "Just... a tough case."
"Go home," Helen said kindly. "Get some sleep. You’re back on tomorrow night, right?"
"Right," I said. "Tomorrow."
I walked to the locker room. I moved like I was underwater. Every motion—opening the locker, taking off my stethoscope, changing into my sneakers—required immense, deliberate concentration.
Left foot. Right foot. Zip the bag. close the door.
I walked out to the parking garage. The concrete was cold. My car was sitting under a flickering light on the fourth floor.
I got in. I sat in the driver's seat. I put the key in the ignition.
I didn't turn it.
I just sat there.
Months.
The word replayed in my head, a loop of tape I couldn't stop.
Things are complicated.
She's just a roommate.
I'm thinking of leaving.
He had erased me. To make room for her, he had to make me small. He had to turn our life—our blue kitchen, our shelves, our Sunday mornings—into a cage he was trying to escape.
I drove home.
I don't remember the drive. I don't remember the turns. I don't remember the traffic lights. My brain had disconnected from my hands. I was an autonomous vehicle programmed to return to base.
I parked in front of the rowhouse.
The lights were off. Of course they were. He was on shift. He was at the station. Maybe he was sitting in the kitchen right now, drinking coffee, looking at the spot where Avery used to stand. Maybe he was texting her. Maybe he was panicking.
I walked up the stoop. I unlocked the door.
The smell of the house hit me. It smelled of us. It smelled of the dinner he had cooked three nights ago. It smelled of the laundry detergent we both used.
It smelled of a lie.
I walked into the living room. I didn't turn on the lights. I dropped my bag on the floor. I didn't take off my coat.
I sat down on the couch.
On the coffee table, there was a piece of paper. It was a printout from an ultrasound. Not a real one—not a baby. It was a joke. A few months ago, I had had an ovarian cyst checked. The tech had given me the printout, smiling. Just a cyst. All clear.
Declan had found it on the counter. He had picked it up, squinted at it, and said, “Looks like a jellybean. We should frame it. Our first jellybean.”
We had laughed. We had taped it to the fridge for a week, then it had migrated to the coffee table, buried under mail.
I picked it up now.
In the dark, I could barely see the grainy image. Just a blur of grey and black.
I stared at it.
Our first jellybean.
He had said that in February.
He was sleeping with her in February.
He was laughing with me in the kitchen, holding a picture of my uterus, making jokes about our future children, while the scent of another woman was still on his skin.
I didn't cry.
Crying implies a reaction to pain. This wasn't pain. This was amputation.
I sat there. The house settled around me. The refrigerator hummed. The floorboards creaked.
I sat there while the digital clock on the cable box clicked from 9:00 to 10:00. To midnight. To 3:00 a.m.
I sat there until the windows began to turn grey with the false dawn.
I held the paper in my hand until my fingers went numb. I didn't move. I didn't blink. I just watched the darkness slowly retreat, revealing the shapes of the room. The shelves he built. The chair he sat in. The life we lived.
It was all still there. The furniture. The walls. The books.
But it was hollow. It was a movie set. And the cameras had finally stopped rolling.
I waited for the sun. I waited for him. I waited for the end of the world.