I lay there and listened to Nigel breathing.
And I thought about him on the curb outside his office, twenty-two years earlier, describing a cloud that looked like a sheep that gave up halfway.
I wish you could see it.
Someday.
I trusted him.
So I said yes.
The surgery was scheduled three months later.
Those weeks crawled.
There were tests. More scans. Blood work. A meeting with the ethics board where three doctors and a lawyer asked me, very slowly, whether I understood that my husband would be holding a scalpel to my eye.
“I understand,” I said.
“And you’re not feeling pressured by him in any way?”
I laughed.
“If anything,” I said, “he’s trying to talk me out of it.”
That was true. That was the strange part.
The closer the date got, the more nervous Nigel became.
I heard the tremor in his voice when he reviewed the consent forms with me at the kitchen table. Reading them out loud. Every word. Twice.
