Two Months After Our Divorce, I Found My Ex-Wife Alone in a Hospital Hallway
The first thing I noticed was the hospital bracelet around her wrist.
The second was how thin that wrist had become.
I was halfway down the fourth-floor corridor of Mercy Lake Hospital when I stopped so suddenly that a nurse nearly walked into my back.
At first, I convinced myself I was mistaken.
The woman sitting beneath the window looked nothing like the person I had shared a bed with for five years.
Her shoulders disappeared inside an oversized hospital gown. Her dark hair, once long enough to fall halfway down her back, had been cut just below her ears. An IV line ran from her hand to a metal pole beside the chair.
She wasn’t reading.
She wasn’t looking at her phone.
She wasn’t even watching the people passing her.
She was simply staring at the floor.
Then she lifted her face.
And my stomach dropped.
“Sophie?”
Her eyes widened.
For several seconds, neither of us moved.
Then she whispered my name.
“Ethan?”
I had imagined seeing my ex-wife again a hundred different ways.
At a grocery store.
At some restaurant with another man.
Maybe across the street someday, both of us pretending not to notice each other.
I had never imagined finding her alone in a hospital gown two months after our divorce.
And I definitely hadn’t imagined being terrified that she might die.
My name is Ethan Walker.
I’m thirty-four years old, and until that afternoon I believed the worst mistake of my life had already happened.
I thought it was my divorce.
I was wrong.
The real mistake had happened long before either of us signed the papers.
It was believing I understood my wife simply because I lived beside her.
Sophie and I met when we were twenty-six.
