Stable.
That word should have comforted me. Instead, it felt terrifyingly thin.
“Is it cancer?” I asked.
Sophie closed her eyes.
Dr. Keller didn’t answer right away, and that pause told me enough.
“We don’t have final pathology yet,” he said. “Some findings are concerning. We’re waiting on results.”
I felt as if someone had reached into my chest and gripped my heart.
I turned back to Sophie.
“How long have you been coming here alone?”
She swallowed.
“Since January.”
January.
Months.
Not weeks.
Months.
I thought of all the evenings I’d stayed late at the office. All the texts from her that I answered with one-word replies. All the nights she sat across from me at dinner, quieter than usual, while I assumed she was simply lost in the same grief that had swallowed us both.
I thought of the day she packed her clothes.
How calmly she folded each sweater.
How she paused at the bedroom door and looked around as if memorizing the place.
I had thought she was accepting the end of us.
Now I wondered if she had been saying goodbye to more than our marriage.
“Sophie,” I said, my voice breaking, “why would you go through this alone?”
She gave a tired smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
“I wasn’t alone.”
I glanced around the empty hallway.
She understood what I was thinking.
“My mother came when she could,” she said. “A neighbor drove me after one appointment. Sometimes I took rideshares. It was manageable.”
Manageable.
I hated that word.
I hated the picture it created: Sophie sitting in the back seat of a stranger’s car after tests that could change her life, holding herself together because she had decided I was no longer someone she could call.
Dr. Keller took the file gently from my hand and returned it to Sophie’s bedside chart.
“We should continue this conversation inside,” he said.
Sophie didn’t move.
Neither did I.
The space between us felt full of ghosts.
Finally, she looked at the doctor. “Can we have a minute?”
He hesitated, then nodded. “One minute. Then you need to rest.”
When he disappeared into the room, Sophie sank back into the chair by the window. The movement looked painful, though she tried to hide it.
