Chapter Four
I went to see her.
I didn’t tell Elias. I’d like to say that was a principled decision. It wasn’t. It was the first time in our marriage I kept something from him on purpose, and I did it because I wanted to know how it felt.
It felt good. I’m not proud of that either.
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The dialysis center was on the second floor of a medical building near Northgate. Twenty-four reclining chairs, twenty-four machines, twenty-four people with tubes running out of their arms.
Mara Quinn was in chair eleven, by the window.
I’d seen her once, at a party five years ago. She’d been tall and loud, with a laugh you could hear across a room. The woman in chair eleven weighed maybe a hundred pounds. Her skin had a yellowish cast. Her hair was pulled back in a way that told me it had started to thin.
She saw me in the doorway and went very still.
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“You’re Wren,” she said.
“I am.”
She looked at my stomach. Then she closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, they were wet.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I told him to tell you. I told him in November.”
?
I don’t know what I expected. A rival, maybe. A woman who’d smile at me like she’d won.
What I got was a dying person apologizing to me from a chair she couldn’t leave for four hours.
I hated how quickly my anger had nowhere to go.
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“He told me you knew,” she said. “In November. He texted that you were fine with it.”
The room was loud with machines. I still heard my own heartbeat.
“I found out yesterday,” I said. “In his glovebox.”
Mara put a hand over her mouth.
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We talked for forty minutes. She was funny, which I resented. She asked about the baby’s name, and I didn’t tell her, and she didn’t push.
She told me she’d been offered a deceased-donor kidney in August and it had fallen through. She told me her numbers were getting worse every month. She told me, without drama, that her doctors thought she had about a year on dialysis before her heart gave out.
“If you ask him not to do it,” she said, “I’ll understand. I mean that.”
I didn’t know what to say to a sentence like that. I still don’t.
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Her mother arrived at 2:15.
Diane Quinn was sixty, silver-haired, dressed for a board meeting. She took one look at me and her face closed like a door.
“Mrs. Hale,” she said.
“Mrs. Quinn.”
“I assume Elias sent you.”
“No.”
“Then I assume he doesn’t know you’re here.” She smiled. It didn’t reach anywhere. “That seems to be how the two of you communicate.”
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Mara said, “Mom.”
Diane ignored her. She stepped close enough that I could smell her perfume, something expensive and cold.
“He was engaged to my daughter for three years,” she said, low. “He was always going to come back to her. One way or another. You should prepare yourself for that.”
?
I left without answering. I’m not proud of that, either. There are a lot of things in this story I’m not proud of, and I’m going to keep telling you about them, because otherwise you’ll think this was only about what Elias did.
?
Mara caught up with me at the elevator.
She’d unhooked herself—I found out later that a nurse had shouted at her for it—and she was holding a gauze pad against her arm, breathing hard.
“Wren. Wait.”
The elevator doors opened. I didn’t get in.
“Don’t listen to my mother,” she said. “He isn’t coming back to me. He never was.”
“Then why is he doing this?”
Mara looked at me for a long time.
“He still hasn’t told you,” she said. “Has he? Why he said yes.”
The elevator doors closed again, empty.