He Missed Every Chemo For Her Chapter 09

He Missed Every Chemo For Her Chapter 09

He stayed a month.

Every morning when I left for the Institute at six–thirty, he was standing across the street. Every night when I came

back, he was there. He stopped calling. He stopped texting. He just stood.

Copenhagen in December is not a city you stand in. There were mornings the wind came off the harbor at minus

eleven and he’d be there in that black coat with ice in his eyebrows.

The night porter started giving him coffee. The dachshund woman started nodding at him. I hated all of them a little.

“The American is still downstairs,” Lars said one afternoon, not looking up from a chart. “Shall I call the police?”

“No.”

“He is very cold.”

“He’s very stubborn.”

Lars turned a page. “In Denmark we have an expression. A man who stands outside in the snow is not proving he loves you. He is proving he can stand in snow.”

I laughed for the first time in weeks.

Then came the eighteenth of December.

I’d been in theatre for fourteen hours. A dissection went wrong, and then went right, and I came out at eleven at night

shaking with adrenaline and hunger, and I walked home through empty streets because I couldn’t face a taxi.

He was leaning against the lamppost. Grey–lipped. Grey–faced. He straightened up when he saw me and it took him

two tries.

“You’re back,” he said, and tried to smile.

I stopped.

“Have you eaten?” he asked. “There’s a place on the corner. I ordered you the chicken soup, I’ve been keeping it warm,

they know me now-”

“Grant. What is the point of this?”

“There is a point.” His teeth were chattering. “Waiting for you is the only time I feel like a person.”

I stood there in the snow and I heard Richard’s voice: be as cruel as you have to be.

But looking at him–the man who once carried me up four flights of stairs with the flu, reduced to a shivering

scarecrow outside a building he wasn’t allowed into–I found I didn’t have any cruelty left in me. Just tiredness, and a

very old, very quiet sadness.

“You should go in,” he said suddenly. “It’s too cold. Don’t get sick, please. Please don’t get sick.”

He turned to walk away.

“Where are you going?”

He stopped, back to me. “There’s a hostel on Istedgade. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

I watched him take three slow steps through the snow, shoulders shaking.

“Grant.”

He froze.

“Come up.”

He turned around so fast he nearly fell.

My apartment is four hundred square feet and always too warm. He sat on the edge of my sofa holding a mug of

tea in both hands, staring at the floor like he wasn’t allowed to look anywhere else. Snow melted off his coat into dark

spots on the rug.

“How long since you had a real meal?”

“I eat.”

“What do you eat?”

He didn’t answer.

I sighed, got up, and went into the tiny kitchen, and made the only thing I’ve ever made well–the chicken soup with the too–thick noodles that I used to make him after night shifts, that his mother taught me, that I hadn’t cooked since April.

I set the bowl in front of him.

He stared at it. Steam rising. He didn’t move.

“Eat,” I said.

He picked up the spoon. He took one mouthful.

And then he started to cry–silently, terribly, tears falling straight into the bowl while he kept eating, spoonful after

spoonful, like a man who couldn’t stop doing either.

I sat across from him and said nothing at all.

“Nora,” he finally choked. “I’m so sorry.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

Then I told him the truth I’d flown four thousand miles to be able to say out loud.

“I know you are,” I said. “And I don’t love you anymore.”

The apartment went completely silent except for the radiator ticking.

He set the spoon down very carefully, like it was made of glass.

“Is there,” he whispered, “any chance at all?”

And before I could answer, my phone lit up on the counter between us.

NORDIC PEDIATRIC INSTITUTE – RADIOLOGY.

[Dr. Quinn, please call urgently regarding your surveillance scan.]