Chapter 5
HOSPITAL DAYS
Ilearn the schedule.
Not because anyone teaches it to me — no one sits me down and says here's how days work now. I learn it by being present long enough that the patterns press themselves into you.
Vitals check every four hours — blood pressure cuff, thermometer, the nurse typing something into the screen without looking at you.
Breakfast tray around seven-thirty, always cold by the time someone removes the plastic lid, always including a yogurt that Ethan won't eat and a juice box that he drinks in two pulls like a kid at recess.
Shift change happens quietly in the hallway — footsteps overlapping, clipboards exchanged, a murmur of French too fast for me to follow even though I've spoken it my whole life.
Physiotherapist at nine, if she's not running late, which she always is.
Doctor rounds somewhere between ten and noon, depending on the day, depending on the emergencies that outrank a stable pelvic fracture in the triage of someone else's worst morning.
I learn all of this because I'm here for all of it.
Three days in, and I haven't missed a single one.
My alarm goes off at 4:50 AM.
The phone alarm I'd turned off after the first morning because in the dead silence of a hospital room at night — just the machines and his breathing and the corridor light bleeding through the half-open door — the sound was obscene.
Ethan stirred. And the last thing I need is him asking why I'm awake before five.
So now it's the silent vibration alarm, the one I set on my watch, the one that buzzes against my wrist like a secret between me and the terrible fluorescent dawn.
I slide out of the recliner the nurses brought in on day two.
It's better than the plastic chair but only technically — like how a paper cut is better than a splinter, in that you can still feel both of them in the morning.
I take my bag into the bathroom down the hall.
Not the one in his room. I tried that once and the light was too loud and the mirror was too small and I could hear his breathing change through the door, and doing my makeup while listening to someone sleep felt like a kind of trespass I wasn't ready to name.
Foundation first. Light coverage — enough to erase the shadows under my eyes but not enough to look like I'm wearing foundation to a hospital.
Concealer where the sleep deprivation has left bruises.
A touch of mascara. Lip balm that has a faint tint I can claim is just hydrating.
The whole operation takes eleven minutes.
I've timed it. I used to take forty-five minutes for a brunch date.
This is the stripped-down, wartime version of my face — the one that says I woke up like this, naturally glowing, definitely slept eight hours, no I don't need your concern.
I check the mirror. The girl looking back at me is convincing.
She looks like someone who has it together.
She doesn't look like someone who was awake until 2 AM replying to client emails from a hospital recliner and then lay in the dark for another hour listening to the machines beep and wondering if this was what her life was now.
Good enough.
I slip back into the room. His jacket is hanging on the back of the recliner where I left it — I brought it home on day one to wash it and brought it back and he didn't say anything about that and I didn't explain.
He's still asleep — or doing his version of sleep, which involves one arm thrown over his eyes and his mouth slightly open and a deep, steady rhythm that sounds deliberate, like even unconscious he's managing something.
I sit down. I open my laptop. I have three emails from a client named Derek who needs his restaurant logo revised for the fourth time and doesn't understand why changing the font from Helvetica to Garamond doesn't qualify as a minor tweak.
I start typing a reply that is polite and professional and doesn't contain the sentence Derek, I am writing to you from a hospital room where a man I haven't even called my boyfriend is recovering from a broken pelvis, and your font opinions are not currently my top priority.
I delete the draft. Start again. Nicer this time.
Maman comes every day.
That's what I call her now. Not in my head — in my head she's still Ethan's mother, or Madame Morin, or the woman who hugged me so hard my ribs creaked and something inside me broke open that I still haven't fully closed.
But to her face, she's Maman. Because that's what Ethan calls her, and she introduced herself to me by grabbing both my hands and saying, Tu peux m'appeler Maman, tout le monde le fait — you can call me Maman, like everyone else does — and I nodded because the alternative was explaining that I don't actually know what I am to her son.
She brings food. Not hospital food — real food, arriving in Tupperware containers with masking tape labels in her handwriting. Tourtière the first day. Shepherd's pie the next. Something with lentils after that, which she calls soupe but that could anchor a boat.
"Mange, mange," she says to me — eat, eat — pressing Tupperware into my hands before I've even said hello. "T'es trop mince." Too thin, apparently, and therefore a problem Tupperware can solve.
I eat the tourtière. I tell her it's delicious.
It is delicious — or it would be, if my stomach weren't a closed fist from three days of vending machine coffee and stress and the nausea of pretending everything is fine when it isn't. But I eat it.
I smile. I say merci, c'est tellement bon, and she beams, and I feel like the worst person in this building, which in a hospital is a competitive category.
This afternoon she sits across from me in the visitor's chair while Ethan sleeps, and she watches me type. My laptop is balanced on my knees, and I'm adjusting Derek's logo for the fourth time, and she leans over and says, in that gentle, conspiratorial voice:
"Tu écris un journal?"
She thinks I'm writing in a journal. She thinks the girl typing furiously on her laptop at her son's bedside is processing her emotions through the written word, like a character in a novel, and not invoicing a man named Derek for a brunch menu redesign.
"Something like that," I say.
She pats my hand. "C'est bien. It helps to write things down."
I close the laptop. Because if I keep typing while she's being this kind to me, I'm going to have to explain what freelance graphic design is, and then she's going to ask if I'm working while her son is in the hospital, and then I'm going to have to explain that yes, I'm working while her son is in the hospital because rent doesn't pause for pelvic fractures and my client roster doesn't include a sorry, my sort-of-boyfriend got hit by a car clause in the terms of service.
So I close the laptop and I talk to her about Ethan as a child, and she tells me about the time he was eight and tried to rescue a cat from a tree and fell out of the tree and the cat walked down on its own, and I laugh, and it's real, and for about four minutes I forget I'm performing.
Then she says it.
Not loudly. Not like an announcement. She says it the way you tuck a napkin under someone's plate — a small, practical gesture that happens to rearrange everything.
"Tu sais, Nora — tu n'as pas besoin d'être si polie avec nous. Relax."
You don't need to be so polite with us. Relax.
It lands somewhere between my ribs. Not hard — more like a finger pressing on a bruise you didn't know you had.
Because polite isn't the word she means.
She means careful. She means measured. She means the version of me I've been presenting to this family since I walked into this hospital — the competent one, the steady one, the one who handles everything and never drops anything and is always, always fine.
She can see it. She's not even trying to see it and she can see it.
I open my mouth to say something — merci, or I'm just tired, or this is actually how I am, I promise — and Camille walks in holding a giant plush firefighter emoji pillow and says, "Look what I found on .
It took two days to ship and I have zero regrets," and the moment cracks open into laughter and Maman rolls her eyes and the conversation moves on.
But I heard it. And she knows I heard it.
Later that day, I'm helping him adjust his pillow.
It's a nothing task. The pillow has gone flat on one side and he can't reach behind himself without his whole body protesting, so I lean in and bunch the pillow up and wedge it behind his shoulders.
And my fingers touch his wrist.
Not on purpose. My hand is on the pillow and his arm is on the pillow and the geography of it means my fingers land on the inside of his wrist, on the soft skin where the veins show through, and we both know it happened because we both stop moving at the same time.
One second. Maybe less.
His wrist is warm. That's the only thought I have — not poetic, not dramatic, just: warm. And the warmth makes the air in the room change density, like the molecules rearranged themselves to make space for this contact that wasn't supposed to happen.
I pull my hand back. He adjusts the pillow himself with his other hand, the one that isn't connected to the arm I just touched, and he says, "Thanks," and I say, "Sure," and that's it. One syllable each. The smallest possible doors we could close.
I sit back down. He looks at his phone. I look at my laptop.
But the wrist is still there. I can still feel it — the exact temperature, the exact pressure, the exact half-second where I touched a part of him I've never touched before, in a context that is decidedly un-romantic but that my nervous system has decided to file under extremely important, please review at 3 AM when you're trying to sleep.