Page 114 of Maybe in Another Life

She tries to laugh, but her heart isn’t in it. I move myself slowly, step by step, in the right direction. “You’re sure you don’t want help?” she asks.

I don’t even turn around. “I got it,” I tell her. “You just take care of you.”

It feels as if the bathroom is a million miles away, but I get there, one tiny, tentative step at a time.

When I get back to the living room, I’m feeling cold, so I shuffle over to my things that Gabby brought home from the hospital. I rummage through the bag, looking for my sweatshirt. When I finally see it and pull it out, an envelope drops to the floor. The front simply says “Hannah.” I don’t recognize the handwriting, but I know who it’s from.

Hannah,

I’m sorry I had to trade your care to another nurse. I can’t keep treating you. I enjoy your company too much. And my coworkers are starting to take notice.

I’m sure you know this, but it’s highly unprofessional of any of us on the nursing staff to have a personal relationship with a patient, no matter the scope. I’m not allowed to exchange any personal contact information with you. I’m not allowed to try to contact you after you leave the hospital. If we were to run into each other on the street, I’m not even supposed to say hello to you unless you say hello first. I could be fired.

I don’t have to tell you how much this job, this work, means to me.

I’ve been thinking about breaking the rules. I’ve been thinking about giving you my number. Or asking for yours. But I care too much about my work to compromise it by doing something I’ve sworn not to do.

All of this is to say that I wish we had met under different circumstances.

Maybe one day we will end up at the same place at the same time. Maybe we’ll meet again when you aren’t my patient and I’m not your nurse. When we are just two people.

If we do, I really hope you say hello. So that I can say hello back and then ask you out on a date.

Warmly,

Henry

“He left me the house,” I hear from the couch. I tuck the letter away in my bag and turn to see Gabby crying, looking at the coffee table. She has the deed to the house in her hands.

“Yeah,” I say.

“His parents paid for the down payment. A lot of his own money went into the mortgage.”

“Yeah.”

“He feels bad,” she says. “He knows what he’s doing is screwed up, and he’s still doing it. That’s what’s so strange about this. That’s not like him.”

I set the walker in front of the couch and slowly let myself down. I really hope we aren’t moving from this couch anytime soon, because I think that’s all the energy I have for a while.

Gabby looks at me. “He must really love her.”

I look at her and frown. I put my hand on her back. “It doesn’t justify what he did,” I tell her. “His timing, his selfishness.”

“Yeah,” she says. “But...”

“But what?”

“He did everything he could except stay.”

I hold her hand.

“Maybe he just has a feeling about her,” Gabby says, echoing my sentiments from yesterday morning. Although, I’ll tell you, it feels like a decade ago. “Maybe he can justtell.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything.

“I was never sure he was the one. Even when you asked me the other day, I could sort of feel myself sugarcoating what I really thought. I just thought Mark was a smart decision. We’d been together for a long time, and I just figured that’s what you do. But I never had the moment when I justknew.You,” she says to me, “have that feeling.”

I dismiss her. “I’ve had that feeling before, though. For a long time, I had that feeling about Ethan. Now I have it about Henry. I mean, maybe it doesn’t count, if you have it for more than one person.”

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