Leo arrived three hours later.
He walked into my hospital room and did not ask what the doctors had said. Did not ask if I was in pain. Did not look at the monitors. He asked when I would be released because the house was a mess from the party and his mother was really upset about how the evening had gone. Then he sat in the corner chair and checked his phone for twenty minutes.
I lay there watching my husband scroll through what appeared to be a bowling league group chat while I could not feel my own legs, and I thought: this is the man I chose. This is the man I married. Sometimes your judgment is so thoroughly compromised that you cannot even locate the moment it went wrong.
A nurse came in around nine. She asked the standard screening question, the one they ask everyone, about whether I felt safe at home. But she asked it slowly, making eye contact, leaving space after it. I said yes automatically, the way you do when the question has not yet made contact with anything real. But it sat in my chest afterward, that question, heavy and refusing to dissolve.
