“Who is here with you?” I asked, looking around the bustling corridor. “Where is your family? Your mother?”
“My mom is coming from India next week,” she said, her voice exhausted. “But the chemotherapy cycles are aggressive. I didn’t want her to see me like this until I had to. I’ve been managing.”
Managing. She was thirty-two years old, sitting alone in a Budapest clinic, watching poison drip into her veins from a plastic bag, completely isolated because she had tried to shield the people she loved from her pain.
“No,” I said, standing up and wiping a sudden, fierce tear from my face. “You aren’t managing alone anymore.”
The Return
I didn’t ask for permission. I didn’t act like the husband who had a legal right to be there, because I had signed that right away sixty days ago. But I acted like the man who still loved her.
