As I watched him hurry Nancy off toward the medical room, my chest felt cold and hollow.
When I had been bleeding out from the miscarriage, he hadn’t looked half as worried. Now, all he saw were Nancy’s reddened fingers—never the blistered skin on my arm, already breaking out in a rash from the seafood.
I took a taxi to another hospital’s emergency department.
The doctor frowned at the bruised, vein-marked mess of my arms, unable to find a spot for an IV. In the end, he gave me only two tubes of ointment to apply externally.
Just weeks earlier, when I’d been too sick from morning sickness to keep food down, I’d gone to Edwin’s hospital for a nutrient drip.
Nancy as the intern nurse, had used me as practice, jabbing both arms more than thirty times without finding a vein.
When I’d asked for a more experienced nurse, Edwin had scolded me. “If you can’t handle a little pain, how will you ever give birth?”
By the time I got home that night, it was nearly eleven.
There was a message from Edwin on my phone.
[Working late tonight. Not coming home.]
I opened my social feed on a whim.
Sure enough—half an hour earlier, Nancy had posted a photo with a caption: [Hope I’ll always be the one my big brother cherishes most!]
In the picture, Edwin was carefully tending to her hand.
Below, he’d commented: [If I don’t cherish you, who else would I do?]
When they were much younger, Nancy had been Edwin’s neighbor back in his hometown, the daughter of a family friend.
Three months ago, Nancy moved to West Lake to be near him.
He’d placed her in his own department for her internship—and even gave her the single dormitory room assigned to him by the hospital.
Lately, I’d seen that my usually cold, reserved husband also has a gentle and considerate side.
He would drape his coat over Nancy when she nodded off at the nurses’ station. He would pick the cilantro out of her meals without her asking.
Once, she casually mentioned wanting that viral apple tea from Southside and even if he finished surgery late, he’d take a detour across town just to buy it for her.
In contrast, he was far less attentive to me, his wife.
If I stayed up all night working on design drafts and complained about my back aching, he’d tell me to “get used to it.”
In two years of marriage, he had never remembered that I hated scallions. When I invited him to see a new film, he always had an excuse.