She scooped up the novel and tossed it into a wicker basket filled with a dozen more just like it, waiting to be taken to Goodwill. There was another box by the front door and a third in her trunk. Junk food for the brain, her mother called them. But her eyes were already sliding to the stack of new titles on the nightstand. Tonight, Johanna Lindsey’s latest awaited.
She poked through the jumble of unopened mail beside the bed, including the master’s program course catalog she’d been doing her best to avoid, finally locating the steel-and-gold Rolex her mother had given her when she finished undergrad. As expected, it had stopped running, the date in the little magnifying bubble off by three days. She reset the time and slid it onto her wrist, then set her sights on a mug of strong coffee. No way was she facing today without caffeine.
In the kitchen, she eyed her surroundings with a creeping sense of overwhelm; the sink full of dishes, the brimming trash can, the remnants of last night’s takeout from Eastern Paradise still sitting on the counter. She’d meant to tidy up after dinner, but then Random Harvest came on and she hadn’t been able to tear herself away until Greer Garson and Ronald Colman were finally reunited. By the time she stopped blubbering, she’d forgotten about the kitchen. And now there wasn’t time if she was going to make it across town by eleven.
She toyed with calling to cancel as she splashed half-and-half into her mug—a sore throat or a migraine, a messy case of food poisoning—but she’d already bailed twice this month, which meant she had to do this.
In the shower, she rehearsed for the grilling she knew was coming: questions about her studies, her hobbies, her plans for the future. The questions never changed, and it was getting harder and harder to pretend she cared about any of it. The truth was, she had no hobbies to speak of, dreaded the idea of returning to school, and her plans for the future were in serious doubt. But she would put on a brave face and say the right things, because that’s what was expected of her. And because the alternative—a deep dive into the black hole that had become her life—was simply too exhausting to contemplate.
She padded to the bedroom, toweling her hair as she went, doing her best to resist the familiar pull from her nightstand. It was a ritual she’d begun of late, starting each day with one or two of Hux’s letters, but there wasn’t time this morning. And yet she found herself opening the bottom drawer, lifting out the box she kept there. Forty-three envelopes addressed in his thin, sprawling script, a lifeline tethering her to him, keeping her from hitting bottom.
The first had arrived in her mailbox just five hours after his flight left Logan. He’d sent it overnight delivery, to make sure it arrived on the right day. He’d written another while sitting at the gate and one more while on the plane. They’d come nearly every day at first before leveling off to one or two a week. And then they’d simply stopped coming.
She glanced at the photo beside the bed, taken at a restaurant on the cape the weekend after he’d proposed. Dr. Matthew Edward Huxley—Hux to everyone who knew him. She missed his face, his laugh, his silly jokes and off-key singing, his love of all things trivia and his perfect scrambled eggs.
They’d met at a charity event for Tufts’ new neonatal intensive-care wing. His smile had made her go weak at the knees, but it was who he was underneath that smile that actually sealed the deal.
The child of two special needs teachers, he had learned the value of service early on and by example. But during his freshman year at UNC, a logging truck had jumped the median on I-40 and hit his parents’ car head-on. He quit school after the funeral, rudderless and bitter, and spent a summer on the Outer Banks, playing beach bum with a pack of surfers and numbing himself with Captain Morgan.
Eventually, he’d pulled himself together, returning to UNC, then going on to medical school. His plan had been to specialize in internal medicine, but after one week of pediatric rounds, those plans had changed. When his residency was over, he had signed with Doctors Without Borders to provide care to children in South Sudan, as a way of honoring his parents’ memory.
It was one of the things she loved most about him. His story was far from perfect; no trust fund or country-club upbringing for Matthew Huxley. He’d gone through some things—things that had rocked him to the core—but he’d found his footing and a way to give back. It was hard to see him off when the time came, but she was proud of the work he had committed to doing, even if his letters were difficult to read.
In one he’d admitted to taking up smoking. Everyone here smokes like a fiend. Maybe to keep their hands from shaking. We’re all so incredibly tired. In another, he’d written about a journalist named Teresa who was there doing a story for the BBC and how she kept him connected to the outside world. He wrote about the work too, about endless days in makeshift surgeries, children maimed, orphaned, terrified. It was worse than he’d ever imagined, but it was making him a better doctor—tougher but more compassionate.