My wife, Maeve, is the kind of person who texts me if she’s going to be ten minutes late.
I need you to understand that before I tell you the rest, because otherwise none of what I did that night will make any sense. Ten minutes. If she got stuck behind a train, she texted. If the line at the pharmacy was long, she texted. In eleven years of marriage, I could count on one hand the times I didn’t know exactly where she was.
She’s a pediatric nurse, so her schedule was never easy. Shifts ran long. Parents needed one more question answered before they could breathe. A kid would get scared right at discharge and Maeve would sit on the edge of the bed and talk them down while the clock ran past the end of her shift. She never complained about it. That was just who she was.
But lately the job had been getting to her. More than usual.
Maeve always cared about her patients, sometimes too much, if you ask me, but every so often one of them got right under her skin and stayed there. For the last few months it had been a six-year-old named Ava. She never told me the medical details, she was careful about that, patient privacy, but she’d mention Ava’s name at dinner sometimes and go quiet after. All she’d say was that Ava’s family was having a hard time, and that sending a kid home from the hospital didn’t always mean the hard part was over.
But it’s being built in the daylight now. All of it. Every shelf, every dollar, every decision, where I can see it, where everyone can see it.
And I’ve come to think that’s the only way it was ever going to work anyway. Not just the center.
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