Divorced and dying;now watch me rise

"Mrs. Green, I'm so sorry. You only have a few months to live." I heard the words. I just couldn't make them mean anything. Dr. Pullman was still talking. I could see his mouth moving, could see him leaning forward with that particular look doctors practiced, the one that was supposed to feel kind, but the sound had gone strange in my ears, like someone had turned the volume down on the whole world. Systemic Lupus Erythematosus. Stage four organ involvement. Kidneys failing. Treatments no longer responding. Three to six months. I was twenty eight years old. "Nora." He said my name carefully. "Is there someone who can be with you today?" "My husband," I said. "I'll call my husband." I pulled out my phone and called Damien. It rang. And rang. Went to voicemail. "Hey, it's Damien. Leave a message." I hung up. Called again. Same thing. I sat in that chair for a moment just holding the phone, looking at his name on the screen, and I felt something I didn't have a word for yet. Not hurt. Not anger. Just a hollow, tired recognition of a pattern I had been too sick and too in love to name. "There are experimental options," Dr. Pullman said, sliding a pamphlet across the desk. "They're expensive, not covered by standard insurance, but they exist." I picked it up. Looked at the number at the bottom. Set it back down. "I'll look into it," I said, because I needed to say something that sounded like I was still a functioning person. I drove home on autopilot. My hands on the wheel, my eyes on the road, and somewhere behind my ribs a pressure building and building that I was not ready to release yet because if I released it while driving I would not make it home. I made it home. I sat in the driveway and I looked at our red brick house, the garden I had planted myself on a day when my joints were screaming and I had to sit in the dirt to do it, the lavender along the porch that I had read was calming. I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. And then I cried. Not gracefully. Not quietly. I cried the way you do when there is nobody watching, when you have been holding something so heavy for so long that your arms finally just give out. My whole body shook with it. Three years of needles and medications and doctors who told me I was being dramatic before someone put the right name to what was happening, three years of fighting something invisible and exhausting, and now a number. Three to six months. I gave myself five minutes. Then I wiped my face. Took a breath. Called Damien one more time. Voicemail. I went inside. The house was quiet in the way houses are when they're waiting for something. I dropped my keys in the bowl by the door and I was about to go upstairs when I heard it. A laugh. Low, comfortable, the kind you only make when you feel completely at home somewhere. I walked into the living room. Damien was on the couch. Our grey couch, the one I had picked out. And beside him, close enough that their knees were touching, was Dr. Vivienne Cole. My therapist. For eight months I had paid her a hundred and forty dollars a session to sit with me while I cried about my illness, about my marriage feeling cold, about the nights I felt like I was slowly disappearing from my own life. She had nodded, taken notes, told me my feelings were valid. She was wearing a ring. A diamond ring on the finger that announced things. I stood in the doorway of my own living room and for a long moment I just looked at the ring. At the way she was sitting. At the way neither of them startled when I walked in. They had been expecting me. "How long," I said. Damien stood up. He straightened his jacket, which was something he did when he was preparing for a confrontation. "Nora. Let's be adults about this." "How long, Damien." Vivienne answered. "About a year." A year. A year of sessions. A year of me walking into her office broken open, talking about how lonely my marriage felt, how far away my husband seemed, how I was terrified of dying and more terrified of doing it feeling unloved. And she had sat there knowing exactly why my marriage felt that way. I had paid her for that silence. A hundred and forty dollars a session. My throat tightened so hard I had to breathe through it. "You listened to me cry," I said to Vivienne, and my voice was shaking now. I couldn't stop it. "You sat there every Tuesday and you listened to me talk about my husband feeling distant. You told me to be patient. To communicate better." I laughed. It came out broken. "And you were the reason." Vivienne stood up slowly. She had a look on her face that was almost clinical, careful, measured, the same face she wore in sessions. "Nora, I understand this is painful." "Don't." I pointed at her. "Don't use your therapy voice on me right now. You are not my therapist. You are the woman wearing an engagement ring in my living room." "What happened between Damien and I is" "Is a professional violation," I said. "What you did is illegal. It is a licensing violation. I can report you to the ethics board. I can have your license reviewed. I can take you to court for every dollar you took from me while you were doing this." Something moved across Vivienne's face. Then she looked at Damien. And they both looked back at me. And Vivienne almost laughed mockingly, showing her true colors. "Nora," she said admist the laugh, almost choking, "You don't have the money for that fight right now. And you don't have the connections." She pause for a split second. "I'm sorry. But Damien has already spoken to legal counsel." The words landed like cold water. I turned to Damien. "You went to a lawyer before you told me." He said nothing. Which was an answer. "You planned this." My voice had gone very quiet. "While I was at appointments. While I was sick. You were planning this." "It has been over for a long time," he said. "You know that, Nora." "I was fighting for my life." "I know." And the most devastating thing was how tired he sounded. Not guilty. Not even cruel. Just tired, like I had been a long project he had finally decided to abandon. "But I cannot keep watching you disappear. I can't live in this anymore." "So you let her watch me disappear instead. From a therapist's chair." I turned to Vivienne. And something in me that had been grief became something harder. "How unprofessional," I said. "How absolutely shameless. You took an oath. You had a duty of care. You sat with me while I was at my most vulnerable and you used everything I told you." "Oh please spare me the pity speech Nora, I didn't use anything." "You knew everything about my marriage. Every c***k in it. And instead of helping me fix it you walked into it." "Nora." Her voice had an edge now. "I'm going to say this once. You were so consumed with surviving that you stopped being a wife. Damien needed someone present. You were barely here." The words were meant to sting. They did. But I had been stung before. "I was barely here," I repeated slowly, "because I was sick. Because my body was failing. Because I was at three appointments a week and medicating through pain you cannot imagine and I was still trying." My voice cracked at the edges. "I was still trying every single day." "Nora," Damien said. "Don't." "You know you actually need to calm down." Vivienne said "You do not get to tell me to calm down in my own house." I shot back Vivienne took a step toward me. I don't know who moved first after that. I think I did. My hand caught her arm and she pulled back hard and shoved me and then we were a tangle of voices and hands and then Damien was between us, pulling me back, his grip firm on my shoulders. "Nora. Stop. Right now." "She pushed me first." "I don't care. Stop." I wrenched away from him. "She is a guest in this house," he said. His voice was sharp and embarrassed and that embarrassment was what gutted me. He was embarrassed of me. In front of her. "This is beneath you." I looked at him. I looked at his face, at the face I had kissed a thousand times, that had held mine while I cried during the worst hospital nights, that had laughed in parking lots with me when we were young and broke and certain about each other. There was nothing there for me now. There was a brown envelope on the dining table. I had not noticed it when I walked in. "Sign them," he said quietly. "Please, Nora. Let's not drag this out." I picked up my bag. I walked to the door. "I want you both to remember this moment," I said without turning around. "You looked at me and you saw someone finished. Someone with nothing left." I gripped the door handle. "You are going to regret that." Damien's voice followed me out. "Sign those papers, Nora. It's already done." I closed the door behind me.