The One Day You Were My Husband (105)

“So many things to say,” he says, after another long silence.

“Feel free to say them.”

He gives me a look.

“OK. Feel free to say one of them.” I give in and take part of the blanket to cover my legs.

Johan takes a breath. “For starters, Carrie, there are many things about me that have changed. Things your doctor side may not love.”

“I’m a very modern sort of doctor.”

“I meditate every day, for starters,” he replies.

“Oh, so do I.”

“Really?”

“I…well, it’s an ambition of mine. A very real one.”

“I also practice Reiki, and I use crystals for—”

“OK, stop there.”

He’s laughing now.

I try to backtrack. “Although, of course, if you feel some benefit then it doesn’t matter if there’s an evidence base or not.”

Johan glances at me, smiling, before looking back out to sea. “I also wonder if when you prepared your speech, you—”

“I didn’t prepare it!”

“Carrie.”

“I’m serious!”

“There’s no accompanying PowerPoint?”

“There’s not even bullet points in my phone.”

After another long silence, Johan says, “Anyway, look. What I wanted to know was, were you assuming I’d be single, when you decided to come down here? That I’d still be waiting for you?”

“No,” I say. “Not at all. I’ve come down because this was the first time it felt right for me to contact you. But I come with no expectations, Johan. If you’ve met someone else while I’ve been doing my own healing, that’s how it’s meant to be.”

He nods slowly. I cannot read him at all now, which may well be a bad sign.

The sea continues to move. The reeds sway. I think about the journey home, the grieving I will have to do all over again, but I trust I will heal much more quickly this time.

Neither of us moves, neither of us speaks. Five, ten, twenty minutes pass as we sit here under the blanket, and I begin to feel drowsy. Clouds roll in over an uncertain half-moon but the sea remains calm, visible in slowly swaying pools of light under the light bulbs Johan must have strung along the jetty since moving here.

Eventually, with cold hands, I remove the blanket from my knees and pat gently around my pockets for my keys.

“I haven’t been on a single date,” Johan says, just as I stand up.

I sit back down and look at him. The rest of the world has been turned down like a dial. We could be anywhere.

“Nothing. No one.” He smiles for a moment. “It’s still just you, Carrie. Only you.”

His finger traces along my hand under the blanket and warmth expands up my arm. I feel the steadiness of his pulse through his thumb.

“I am a bad catch right now,” I repeat. I can’t quite look at him. “But I’d do anything to make this work. I’d move mountains.”

“Carrie Cole,” he says gently. He runs that same finger down the side of my neck until, finally, I look at him again. “Of course you would move mountains.”

He smiles. I smile. There are only inches between us and my body is humming. The sea is calm, collapsing lazily against the jetty, much in the same way that it did on the beach when we danced together, newly married, all those years ago.

A few thousand turns of the earth. Grief, loss, birth, pain; nothing and everything has changed.

I return home and kiss him, at last, under the same moon, by the same sea—only the story before us is different.

His hands slide into my hair and I feel us keenly, that young married couple: drunk on love, on the starry night, on the feeling that we were the only two people on earth.

Just us. Now, as then, that is enough for me.





Acknowledgments


After six months’ research into the life of a surgeon I concluded that I had bitten off way more than I could chew. What misplaced confidence (or madness) had led me to believe I could ever walk in Carrie Cole’s shoes? (Or clogs? Were those surgical clog things even called surgical clogs? I still didn’t know.)

Were I one of those steely authors who can detach with love from a manuscript that isn’t working, I would have done so. Unfortunately I am a coward, so I just pushed on.

Thankfully, I was in the hands of surgeons who—in spite of working incredible hours, under incredible stress—still found time to answer my questions, to point me toward further research material, and to walk me through endless surgical and medical scenarios until I was, finally, able to put on those clogs and confidently walk Carrie into an operating theater. It is hard to convey how generous they were with their nonexistent spare time, and the care and patience with which they legitimized scenes I had completely made up. I am both profoundly grateful and deeply apologetic for the factual boundary pushing that still remains.

My unending thanks to Hannah Knight and Esther Platt, two brilliant surgeons without whom this book could not have been written. Thank you for condensing your years of learning into something this layperson could understand. Esther, I’m so sorry for the billions of Can I say this???? messages I sent you toward the end. I couldn’t have written this book without your help. And Norm, watching you competently remove cancer from a woman’s body was a fiercely proud moment for me. Thank you for those knowledge downloads at your house.