"Hey, Mona, CoCo is sick today. He misses you and has been waiting for you at the door. Are you coming home today?"
"Alan, I told you, I'm busy lately. Stop calling me all the time. If CoCo is sick, take him to the vet. I'm not a doctor. I'm hanging up..."
"Wait... I miss you too..."
For several months, Mona had been avoiding me, not coming home. I knew she's busy, but was she really too busy to even take a call?
A friend of hers told me that she's been getting close to Jeff lately, and I should be careful.
5
I was hospitalized because of an illness, and coincidentally, so was Jeff. Even more coincidentally, the hallway outside his room was where I ended up. I got sick in the middle of the night and went to the emergency room, but there were no beds available. I remembered Mona had interned at this hospital, so I called her.
But she didn't answer. I called several times, and she finally picked up, but she sounded extremely impatient.
"Alan, what do you want? I'm very busy right now!"
"I'm sick and in the hospital, but there's no bed available. I want to ask if you have ways."
"I can't help if there are no beds. I'm not a doctor. Why are you being so delicate? What's wrong with you? Can't you just get an IV? I'm busy. Don't call me unless it's important."
"But..."
Before I could say anything else, she hung up. I remember her saying that she was in a critical phase of an experiment, so I figured she really was busy and didn't call again.
I slept in the hallway that night. But the next day, I saw Mona rushing into the hospital. I thought she was there to see me, but just as I was about to greet her, she walked right past me and into the room next to mine. I didn't disturb her. I just quietly followed her.
Jeff was in the room. He was sick too. I heard from the patient next to me that Jeff had been admitted urgently in the middle of the night. I must have missed him while I was going through the check-in process.
While I was suffering in the hallway, drowning in pain, Jeff was in the room next door, enjoying a quiet room and Mona's care. How absurd. And that room was probably arranged by Mona herself.
She wouldn't do it for me, but she would for Jeff.
So the urgent matter Mona mentioned was Jeff, wasn't it?