Only a great and final clarity, the kind that arrives once and does not leave.
Can we fix this. I turned the phrase over and found it hollow, the way I had found the consent form hollow hours before.
Because there was a diagnosis to be made here too, and I made it with the same detachment I’d brought to the labs.
What Gethin was proposing to fix was not the marriage.
It was his situation.
He had been caught, humiliated, nearly killed, and abandoned by the woman he’d betrayed me for, and now, weak and frightened in a hospital bed, he wanted the safe thing back — the wife who cared for him, the one who had nursed him through the last catastrophe and would surely nurse him through this one.