Even in her restless, feverish sleep, her right hand remained pressed flat over her surgical incision, her fingers curled tight against the pain. I wanted to take her hand, but I was afraid of moving her arm and dislodging the clear plastic tube of the IV.
I sat on the low, vinyl-covered chair beside her bed, leaning my forehead against the cold metal rail.
“I am going to fix this, Maya,” I said, my voice barely louder than the steady, rhythmic click of the infusion pump.
Her eyelids fluttered slightly, but she did not wake, her breath coming in shallow, ragged puffs that smelled of hospital air and dry heat.
I pulled the folded piece of thick cream paper from my coat pocket and unfolded it under the harsh light of the corridor shining through the window. It was my mother’s heavy stationery, the elegant cursive written in black ink with her expensive fountain pen.
The words were brief and sharp: “Maya, please do not play the victim. We have gone to give you some space. Eleanor.”
My mother had raised me to believe in the absolute sanctity of family, in the duty we owed to one another above all else. Now, looking at my wife’s hollow cheeks, I felt the first hairline crack in everything I had believed about Eleanor.
Why would she write something so deliberate, so cold, to a woman who had just undergone major abdominal surgery and could barely stand?
I folded the paper back up, the sharp crease clicking under my thumb as I slid it back into my pocket.
Downstairs at the admitting desk, the clock on the wall read twenty past two, the second hand sweeping silently around the white face. The clerk behind the safety glass partition was a tired-looking woman with graying hair, her name tag reading Beatrice.
“I need a credit card for the admitting deposit and the deductible,” Beatrice said, her fingers hovering over a black keyboard.
I pulled out my wallet and handed her my personal Visa card, the gold one I kept for international business travel.
While she processed the payment, my phone buzzed in my palm with three rapid notifications from my banking app.
I unlocked the screen, expecting to see the hospital charge of eight hundred dollars.
Instead, the top notification showed a charge of twelve hundred and forty dollars at a restaurant called Prime One Twelve in Miami Beach.
Directly below that was a charge of nine hundred and eighty dollars at the Fontainebleau Hotel, also in Miami.
