“I’d never seen her before all this. But in the last few weeks, she was here almost every day. Sometimes she stayed after visiting hours. We let her, because — well. Because he lit up when she came.”
He lit up.
My dying husband lit up for a woman whose name I did not know.
You can imagine what a wife thinks, standing in a hospital lobby six months pregnant, holding another woman’s sweater.
I didn’t want to believe the worst.
But grief and suspicion are a terrible pair, and they had already moved into my chest together and started rearranging the furniture.
Underneath the sweater, at the very bottom of the bag, I found one more thing.
A small paper crane.
Folded out of a hospital menu, careful and precise, the wings pressed sharp with a fingernail.
I had no idea what it meant.
I turned it over and over in my fingers, and something about it made my throat close, though I couldn’t have told you why.
