“Don’t hate me.”
My husband said it while he was unwinding the bandages from my eyes.
I was sitting up in a hospital bed. Machines beeped softly somewhere to my left. The air smelled like antiseptic and the cheap lemon soap they use in every hospital bathroom. I could feel each layer of gauze loosening, one turn at a time. Cool air touched my eyelids for the first time in two days.
“Before you see this,” Nigel said, “I need to tell you that everything isn’t the way you think.”
I let out a nervous laugh.
“What does that even mean?”
He didn’t answer. His hands kept moving. Slowly. Carefully. The way they’d always moved.
But they were shaking.
I’d been married to this man for twenty years. I’d felt his hands shake exactly once before, the night before our son was born.
My heart started racing.
