CHAPTER SEVEN
PARIS
I spent the first hour of the morning on the phone with an insurance reviewer who wanted to deny six more weeks of coverage for a stroke patient named Mr. Alvarez, on the grounds that his progress notes showed improvement, which was, infuriatingly, the entire point of physical therapy and somehow also the reason insurers used to justify cutting people off before the improvement finished.
I walked the reviewer through the actual functional gap, still unable to climb a single stair independently, still at real risk of a fall that would cost the insurer considerably more than six more weeks of my time, and got the appeal approved on the third escalation, which felt, by the end of it, like its own small campaign won.
Maya Chen had her sixty-second single-leg balance the following Tuesday, and I made her do it twice more just to be sure it wasn’t a fluke, and both times her knee held, quiet and unremarkable, exactly the way a healed knee is supposed to behave.
She’d come in already irritated, dropping her bag harder than necessary onto the bench, and told me before I’d even finished reviewing her chart that she’d nearly quit the whole program that weekend after watching her team’s scrimmage from the sideline in street clothes.
“Everyone kept looking at me like I was going to cry,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to cry. I was going to throw my crutch at somebody, which is different. ”
“Understandable impulse. Let’s see if today gives you a better use for that energy.
” I had her warm up on the bike first, watching her form more than the resistance number, and then walked her through the balance sequence we’d been building toward for three weeks, hip hinge, single-leg stance, the slow, deliberate transfer of weight onto the surgical knee that her whole nervous system still wanted to flinch away from.
“That’s it?” she said afterward, a little suspicious, like I might be about to add a harder version she’d forgotten to mention. “That’s the thing I’ve been failing at for six weeks?”
“That’s the thing.” I made a note in her chart, dated it, circled the number. “Your brain finally stopped bracing for it to give out. That’s most of what this stage is, honestly. Convincing your nervous system the surgery already happened and you can stop guarding against it.”
“So I can tell my coach I’m cleared for cutting drills?”
“You can tell your coach we’re two weeks from cutting drills, if this holds.” I watched her face do the complicated math of a fourteen-year-old weighing patience against a tournament she still wanted badly enough to argue with a grown adult about physics. “I know that’s not the answer you wanted.”
“It’s a better answer than last month,” she admitted, and allowed herself, finally, a real smile, a gap where a permanent tooth hadn’t quite settled in yet.
Watching a body finally do what I’d promised it would, once she trusted the process, gave me an uncomplicated pride I didn’t get much of anywhere else in my life lately.
Dahlia caught me at the front desk afterward, already halfway into a story about a patient’s dog that had eaten an entire resistance band overnight, gesturing with both hands the way she did whenever a story genuinely delighted her.
“The vet said it’ll pass, no surgery, but she’s going to be checking that dog’s stool for a week, which honestly sounds like a worse job than either of ours. ”
“Tell her I said good luck,” I said, laughing despite myself, and it was good, ordinary, entirely unrelated to Ridgeway or Mark or anyone’s marriage, and I held onto the lightness of it the whole walk to meet Imani.
Imani was already at our usual table when I got there, halfway through recounting, with real relish, a standoff she’d had that week with a sixth grader who’d insisted, with total conviction, that he didn’t need to apologize for anything because his sister had started it in 2019.
“Twenty nineteen, Paris. He tracked the grievance for three years. I almost gave him a job in conflict resolution instead of a detention.”
“You love that kid.”
“I love that kid so much it’s a professional liability.” She took a sip of her cappuccino and studied me over the rim, the shift in her attention as obvious as a change in weather. “Okay. What’s actually going on.”
I told her about the calendar entry, the recurring dinner with no location, and then, because saying the first thing out loud made the second one easier, the photo a former coworker had forwarded the week before, Mark and Sabine at a departure lounge at Logan on a Sunday afternoon, coffees in hand, both laughing at something on someone’s phone screen.
Mark had told me that Sunday he was going into the office to catch up on paperwork.
Airports didn’t generally feature paperwork.
“Did you ask him about the airport one,” Imani said.
“He said it was a last-minute trip to see a limited partner in New York. Sabine went because the LP specifically asked for her. It’s a completely reasonable explanation.”
“You keep saying that. Completely reasonable.” Imani set her cup down. “You’ve said it about four different things now, and every time you say it, you sound like you’re trying to convince yourself instead of me.”
“Maybe I am.”
“I’m not going to tell you your husband is cheating on you, because I don’t know that,” Imani said. “And I’m not going to tell you he isn’t, for the same reason. What I will tell you is that you didn’t used to need a phrase like completely reasonable to get through a Tuesday.”
“Do you think he’s sleeping with her?”
I turned my coffee cup a quarter turn on the table, buying myself a second before I answered my own question. “I think if you’d asked me a year ago I would have said absolutely not, and I think the fact that I have to think about the answer now says something on its own.”
“Then ask him directly. Not me. Him.”
“I did, kind of. He said there’s nothing there before I’d even accused him of anything, which felt like he was answering a question I hadn’t quite finished asking yet.”
Imani was quiet for a moment, turning her own cup, and then she said, “Can I ask you something that isn’t about her at all?”
“Go ahead.”
“When’s the last time Mark asked you a real question about your life? Not are you okay, not how was your day. An actual question, where he wanted the whole answer.”
I thought of the funding pitch, the two of us at the kitchen island until midnight, the twenty minutes at dinner planning an imaginary trip to a fishing village neither of us had ever seen, before Sabine’s name lit up his phone and ended it.
“Last week,” I said. “It happens. Just not enough anymore.”
“Okay,” Imani said, gently. “That tells me the man you married is still in there. It doesn’t tell me whether he’s going to choose to be him more often than whoever he’s becoming at that company.”
“I don’t know if I’m protecting the marriage I actually have,” I said, “or the one I remember having. I can’t always tell the difference from inside it.”
“That’s the real question, isn’t it,” Imani said. “I can’t answer it for you. I don’t think anyone can except you, eventually, once you’ve got enough evidence either way.”
She didn’t tell me to leave him. She never once, in that entire conversation, told me what to do, and I loved her for it even while, briefly and unfairly, I wished she would just decide for me so I wouldn’t have to keep carrying the weight of it myself.
“Elliot asked about you two last week,” Imani said, shifting the mood deliberately, the way she did when she sensed I needed a minute to breathe before the walk home. “He wants to know if Mark’s still coming to the thing in June.”
“What thing in June?”
“The firm’s summer barbecue. Elliot’s designing the addition for one of the partners’ houses and got roped into an invitation. I told him I had no idea what your calendar even looks like anymore, which, by the way, is a strange thing to have to say about my best friend’s husband.”
“I didn’t know about a barbecue in June.”
“Well, now you do, from me, which is its own small data point.” Imani reached over and squeezed my hand. “I’m not trying to build your case for you. I just think it’s worth noticing how often I end up being the one telling you things about your own life.”
I thought about all of it the whole walk home, past the clinic where Maya’s knee had finally held for sixty full seconds, past the brownstone stoops where other people’s ordinary evenings were visibly, audibly happening behind lit windows, and I recognized that Imani had handed me the one question I’d been avoiding since the photograph first appeared on my phone.
Whether the marriage I was defending still existed anywhere except in memory, and in the handful of good nights Mark still occasionally gave me, just often enough to keep me from asking the larger question outright.