She keeps her eyes on the road.
“You left that message?”
“It was over. She didn’t go through with it. I hadn’t liked being dragged into it, and no matter how I try to justify it, I betrayed you. That didn’t sit right with me. So one night, I had too much to drink, and I thought shit, Cheryl should tell him. For her sake. For his sake. Hell, for my sake. So we wouldn’t all be living with this awful lie hanging over our heads for the rest of our lives. You two were starting a family of your own.”
I sit there. Just when I think nothing can stun me again, there it is.
“I’ve learned the hard way,” Rachel said. “Lies like that, they stay in the room. They never leave. They rot you slowly from the inside. You and Cheryl couldn’t build a family on a secret like that. And yeah, okay, it wasn’t my secret to tell. But Cheryl made me part of the deception. That secret was poisoning our relationship now too. Yours and mine.”
“So you decided to end the secret,” I say.
Rachel nods. I turn away.
“David?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “Like you said, it was a long time ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
Something else in me breaks; I need to get off this subject. “Does Cheryl know I’m coming?”
Rachel shakes her head. “You told me not to tell her.”
“So she thinks—”
“She thinks it’s only going to be me. We’re supposed to meet in her office.”
“How much longer?”
“Half an hour,” Rachel says, and we fall into silence.
Chapter 32
Rachel parks in the visitor lot at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey. We both don surgical masks. Since Covid, no one thinks twice about seeing someone with a mask, especially near a hospital. Again, it’s a pretty effective disguise.
We start toward the front entrance.
“How long has Cheryl been working here?” I ask.
“Three years. They have a good kidney transplant program.”
“But Cheryl loved working at Boston General.”
“She did,” Rachel agrees. “But staying became untenable after your conviction. The hospital called her a” — Rachel made quote marks with her fingers — “distraction.”
I stare up into the sky.
“One more thing,” Rachel says. “She goes by Dr. Cheryl Dreason now.”
Another pang. “She took Ronald’s name too?”
“It gave her more anonymity.”
“That was really clever of her,” I say.
“Seriously?”
I make a face.
“She lost everything too.”
New husband, fresh pregnancy, still doing the transplant surgery she loves — Rachel’s words don’t seem quite accurate, but it feels ungenerous to say so.
We move inside. Rachel heads to the desk and grabs us visitors passes. We take the elevator to the fourth floor and follow the signs reading RENAL AND PANCREAS TRANSPLANT. Rachel pulls down the mask and waves to the receptionist.
“Hey, Betsy.”
“Hey, Rachel. She’s waiting for you in her office.”
Rachel smiles one more time and then pulls the mask back up. I keep walking by her side, as though this is routine and I know where I’m going. My pulse starts picking up speed. My breath shallows.
I am mere yards away from Cheryl — my ex-wife, the mother of my child, the only woman I ever loved.
I feel myself start to well up. It is one thing to think or imagine this moment. But now that it’s here...
Rachel stops short. “Shit.”
Cops, I figure in the millisecond before I see that no, she isn’t talking about anyone in law enforcement. She’s talking about Ronald Dreason, Cheryl’s new husband. I know Ronald, of course. He was an administrator at Boston General who was always “looking out” for Cheryl. You know what I mean. He just wanted to be her “friend” and it was obvious to me and everyone else, including Ronald’s wife — who, to be somewhat fair, he was separated from at the time — that was bullshit. Naturally I wasn’t happy with the constant “work” texts because, again, obvious. Cheryl laughed them off.
“Okay, yeah, Ronald probably does have a little crush on me,” Cheryl would say. “But it’s harmless.”
Harmless, I scoff now, almost saying it out loud.
Ronald looks at Rachel first. He starts to smile. Cheryl and Rachel are close, so I am sure that Rachel visits here often enough. This encounter is probably, if not familiar, nothing particularly surprising or new. I lower my head and veer a little to my right. I have the mask pulled up. I slow down and turn behind me, as though I’m not with Rachel. Rachel doesn’t miss a step. She keeps walking toward Ronald, takes hold of his arm, and says a little too merrily, “Hey, Ronald.”
Ronald kisses her cheek.
The kiss is stiff, but then again, so is everything about Ronald. I stop right there, not taking that thought any further. I start walking back toward them, staying close to the wall, my face turned toward it. I don’t break stride. I don’t risk a glance in his direction.
I close my eyes and move past him.
Safe.
Rachel is trying to escort him away from us, but he stops her.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Ronald says to her. “Did you hear about David’s escape?”
I hurry-walk away. There are three unmarked doors in front of me. One is where my wife — ex-wife, sorry — will be. Time is ticking. I take hold of the knob on the first door, turn it, step inside.
And there she is.
I had interrupted Cheryl typing on some kind of tablet. She looks up. I still have the surgical mask on and my head is shaved, but that doesn’t matter. She recognizes me right away. For a second, neither one of us moves. We just stare. I am not sure what I feel or, more apropos, what I don’t feel. I feel it all and then some. Every emotion surges through my worn-out veins. It is overwhelming.
For her too.
Cheryl and I fell in love in high school. We dated, got engaged, married, and had the sweetest little boy together.
A weird thought pops into my brain: Ronald might come back. Or a nurse or colleague might come in. I turn and lock the knob. That’s it. That’s the first move I make after seeing Cheryl. I turn back to her, not sure what I will get, what sort of reaction, but Cheryl is already on her feet and running around the desk, and when she gets to me there is no pause, not the slightest hesitation, and as she throws her arms around me and pulls me toward her, I half collapse and she, I swear, holds me up.
“David,” Cheryl says softly, with a tenderness that tears my heart out of my chest and rips it into little pieces.
I hold her. She cries. I cry. I can’t. I just can’t. I have a million questions, but there is a reason I’m here, and it’s not this. With perhaps a little too much edge, I take hold of her arms and pull her off me.
There is no time for a preamble.
“Our son may still be alive,” I say.
She closes her eyes. “David.”
“Please listen to me.”
Her eyes are still squeezed shut. “No one wants that to be true more than I do.”
“You saw the pic?”
“It’s not Matthew, David.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Tears start flowing down her cheeks. She lifts both hands and takes hold of my face. For a moment, I fear I may collapse again and never get up. “Because Matthew is dead,” she says almost too softly. “We buried our little boy. You and I. We stood together and held hands and we watched them put that tiny white coffin into the ground.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t kill him, Cheryl.”
“I wish so much that was true.”
The words sting more than I would have imagined. She looks down. Pain etches its way onto her face. I don’t want to go there, not now, not ever, but I can’t help myself.