But Pam’s condition deteriorated quickly. Each time Heather came to the house for a meeting, Pam’s eyes were a little duller. She was more confused. Slower to understand. Stephen and Pam had planned to stay in the house during the renovation, but the more Pam started wandering, the more they realised how dangerous this could be. After a few months, Stephen and Pam decided to find a rental property a few streets away, and Heather started seeing Stephen at the house alone for meetings. It was during one of these meetings that Heather arrived at the house to find Stephen balancing on the wooden frame of what would soon be the new oak floorboards of their kitchen, his face wet with tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to come back?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
‘Are you sure?’
He nodded, and she crossed the floor from beam to beam, coming to a stop at the beam beside his. ‘Are you okay?’
He smiled. ‘When my patients ask, Am I going to be okay? I never know what to say. In the odd case I can say, Yes, after the surgery you will be as good as new. But in most cases I can’t say that. I have to give them a long answer, like, We hope that your heart will work as it should for some time to come, but we don’t know how long that will be. And the life that you have known up until now will likely never be the same. There will be daily medication, treatment, lifestyle amendments. As for whether I’m okay, that’s complicated too. I’m already feeling better after having a good cry. But Pam is going to get consistently worse and then she’ll die. We don’t know when that will be, or how it will happen. We’ll never have her the way we used to have her.’ His face tensed with the effort, it seemed, of holding back tears. ‘We made the decision today to move Pam to a nursing home sooner rather than later. Which means she won’t even get to enjoy this bloody renovation, which was all for her.’
Now he did cry, in earnest. His face became mangled, and the tears began to flow. It was a powerful thing, Heather thought, watching a man cry while discussing his feelings so eloquently. Unfortunately, she didn’t share his eloquence. Finding herself without words, she did something totally out of character. She stepped across to his plank of wood, and put her arms around him. As Stephen leaned into her, they overbalanced, landing heavily on the beam below them.
‘Oh God,’ Stephen exclaimed. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘No! I’m fine. I mean . . . I think I’m fine.’
‘Did you hit your head?’
‘No.’ She had banged her side quite badly, and she would later find a bruise, but she definitely had not hit her head.
‘Are you certain you didn’t hit your head?’ Stephen repeated, surveying her with a doctorly gaze.
‘I’m certain. But . . . oh no! You’re bleeding.’
The elbow of his white business shirt was soaked through with blood. ‘Just a graze,’ he said. ‘But if you are hurt, please tell me and I’ll take you to the hospital.’
‘I’m fine. Really. But I have bandaids in my car. Come and let me fix up your elbow.’
They finished their meeting in Heather’s car that day. And, after that interaction, things were a bit different between them. At each meeting Heather asked how Pam was, and Stephen would answer honestly, if sadly. When Heather gently probed as to whether Stephen would like to take another look at the plans – as Pam was unlikely to spend much time in the house, it was still possible to change the style to something more to his personal taste – he agreed this wasn’t a bad idea.
‘You know, you’re right. No point mourning my wife in a house that I hate.’
A not-unpleasant side effect of this was that the late changes required several more meetings. Some of these meetings happened in the hospital cafeteria. A couple of times they met at funny little shops that sold specialist taps or hardware. On one such occasion, a salesperson confused Heather and Stephen for husband and wife. As Heather hurriedly opened her mouth to correct them, Stephen chimed in, ‘Yes, you’re right. Happy wife, happy life.’ And he threw her a wink.
Slowly, a closeness grew between them. It was never romantic – at least, not from Stephen’s point of view, as far as Heather could tell. But he had a charming way of letting his guard down around her. Usually it was when he was talking about Pam, and the latest challenge. He was always respectful, never revealing anything that could be seen as humiliating her. That, combined with stories about lives he’d saved （always prised from him, he was very humble） meant Heather was soon ruined for all other men.