We both stared at it.
“How long?” I asked.
“Laur—”
“How long, Nate?”
He let out a breath.
“They suspended me in March.”
“March.”
“Yes.”
“It’s October.”
“I know what month it is.”
“Suspended for what?”
“A case.”
“What case?”
“A case that went wrong.”
“And then?”
“And then I resigned.”
“When?”
“May.”
“You resigned in May.”
“Yes.”
“And every morning since May—”
“I got dressed.”
“I drove here.”
“And I sat in this car.”
I looked around.
At the concrete.
At the oil stains.
At the pay machine blinking by the stairs.
“All day?” I asked.
“Some days.”
“And other days?”
He didn’t answer.
He looked up through the windshield.
Past the concrete.
At the hospital’s windows.
Like he was searching for one in particular.
“I lied to you every day for seven months,” he said.
“I know I did.”
“I know how that sounds.”
“You don’t know how it sounds.”
“You haven’t heard it from this side.”
He nodded.
“Tonight,” he said.
“I’ll tell you everything tonight.”
“Why not now?”
“Because I need to be somewhere at one.”
I stared at him.
“You don’t have a job, Nate.”
“Where do you need to be?”
He looked at me for a long time.
“Tonight,” he said again.
“I promise.”
I got out of the car.
I left the lunch on his dashboard.
I didn’t look back.
But in my rearview mirror, I saw him.
He wasn’t starting the car.
He was walking back toward the hospital doors.
I don’t remember driving home.
I remember sitting in my own driveway for forty minutes.
I remember my phone buzzing with clients.
A bride who wanted peonies instead of roses.
A caterer asking about gluten-free rolls.
I run a small event business.
Cole & Company.
Weddings, anniversaries, the occasional retirement party.
I spend my life making sure other people’s big days go perfectly.
Somehow I’d missed my own husband’s life falling apart.
At three, I picked Poppy up from school.
She climbed in the back with her backpack and a drawing of a horse.
“Did you see Daddy?” she asked.
She knew about the lunch.
