“How long until I’m — normal?”

“Four weeks to feel human.

Eight to feel like yourself.” He looked at her over the chart.

“Mrs.

Sterling, I’ll be honest, you had a rougher run than most.

A routine gallbladder shouldn’t put anybody in here for eleven days.

You got a bile leak and then you got a fever and for about forty hours we were all a lot more worried than we told you.

So go home and be boring for a month.”

She said she would.

She meant it, at the time.

It was 2:40 in the afternoon on a Thursday in April, and Maya Sterling walked out of a hospital carrying a paper bag containing her wallet, her phone, a discharge summary, a prescription for something she intended not to fill, and the pajamas she had been admitted in.

She did not call her husband.

She thought about it in the lobby.

She had her phone out and his name up on the screen, and then she put it away, because she had spent eleven days lying in a bed with a tube in her side thinking about the shape her marriage had taken over the last two years, and she had arrived at a conclusion that felt both childish and necessary: something had to happen.