MY GYNECOLOGIST

Chapter 6: Guilt

RAY ♠️

Ray Knows

The last patient left at six-fifteen.

I walked them out, said the things I always said at the end of an appointment, the follow-up dates, the prescription notes, the gentle professional reassurance that is part of the job and which I have given so many times it lives in my mouth like a second language. I closed the clinic door. I stood in the reception area with the chairs empty and the afternoon light going gold through the windows and the complete, ringing silence of a building that had cleared out.

Then I went back to my office and sat at my desk and tried to remember who I was.

Dr. Ray Lionel. Gynecologist. Married. Thirty-five years old. A man who had built something real and good, a practice, a reputation, a marriage that was comfortable and genuine and more than many people ever found. A man who was, by any reasonable measure, in possession of a good life.

A man who had kissed his married first love in a consultation room six hours ago and had been unable to think about anything else since.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.

The professional violations alone were significant. She had been a patient, she came to me as a patient, sat in that chair as a patient, and the results I gave her were medical results, and the examination I conducted was a medical examination, and the line between all of that and what happened afterward was a line I had crossed so cleanly I had barely felt it go.

The personal violations were worse.

Maya trusted me. That was the specific, nauseating weight of it, not guilt in the abstract, but Maya specifically. Her face over dinner, warm and easy, talking about the fertility treatments she was planning with the particular hope of a woman who believed her husband was on her side. Her hand in mine in the car on the drive home from things. The specific trust of a person who has never been given a reason to doubt you.

I had given her a reason today. She just didn’t know it yet.

I picked up my phone. Found Scarlet’s number, she had given it to me when she booked the follow-up, standard clinic procedure, and I had told myself I was keeping it for professional reasons and had been lying to myself about that since approximately the moment I entered it. I stared at her name.

I should delete it. The decision was obvious and correct and I had made it clearly in my head twice already.

I opened a new message instead.

“I know I shouldn’t.” I typed it and stared at it. Keep going. “I’ve been sitting here trying to talk myself out of this for two hours. I can’t. I need to see you, Scarlet. Not as your doctor. Just…I need to see you.”

I read it back. It was honest. It was also professionally indefensible and personally catastrophic and I sent it before the rational part of my brain could take back control.

Then I sat back in my chair and looked at what I had done and put my face in my hands.

What is wrong with you, I said to myself, inside my head, with feeling.

My phone rang.

I looked at the screen.

Maya.

The specific timing of the universe. I stared at her name for one ring, two rings, and in that small terrible space I was aware of exactly where I was, sitting in my office with my wife’s call coming in and my first love’s message sitting in my sent folder and the sensation of a kiss I had no business giving pressed into the back of my mind like something I could not unfeel.

I answered.

“Hey.” My voice came out normal. I was surprised and ashamed by how normal it came out.

“Hey, you.” Warm. Easy. The voice of a woman who had no idea. “Are you still at the clinic?”

“Just finishing up.” I looked at my desk. At the folder that still had Scarlet’s name on it. I turned it face down. “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s good. I was just going to start dinner and wanted to know if you wanted me to wait.” A pause, and I could hear the small domestic sounds of our kitchen in the background, the particular acoustics of home. “I was thinking of the pasta you like.”

“That sounds good,” I said. My voice was completely steady. I was distantly horrified by my own capacity for this.

“Great. Don’t be too late, okay? I want to talk to you about something.”

Something about those words, I want to talk to you about something, landed with a specific weight. “Talk to me about what?”

“Nothing bad,” she said, and I heard the smile in it. “Good things. Just come home and I’ll tell you over dinner.”

She hung up. I sat with the phone in my hand for a long moment. Good things. Maya’s good things were, I already knew, I had been half-knowing for weeks, the fertility treatments. The timeline she had been researching. The next step she wanted to take with a husband she trusted completely to want the same things she did.

I put the phone in my pocket and stood up and looked around my office, the consultation chair where Scarlet had sat, the desk where I had handed her results that changed the entire architecture of her marriage, the window I had stared at when I was trying to find something to look at that wasn’t her face.

I turned off the light. Locked the door. Drove home to my wife.

Maya had made the pasta. The kitchen smelled like garlic and something warm and home and I stood in the doorway for a moment watching her move around the kitchen with the ease of a woman completely at peace in her own life and felt the guilt hit me properly for the first time. Not the abstract guilt of a decision made in an office. The specific guilt of a man standing at his own front door looking at his wife who deserved better than the afternoon he had just had.

“You’re here.” She turned and smiled and came to kiss my cheek and I let her and hated myself quietly.

“Traffic,” I said. The lie came too easily.

We ate. She talked about her day, a project at work, a colleague who had done something impressive, the small detailed texture of a life being lived fully. I listened. I responded. I was present in every way except the most important one and she didn’t notice because she had never had a reason to look for the gap.

Then, over the last of the pasta, she set down her fork and looked at me with the particular brightness of someone about to say something they have been saving.

“I spoke to a clinic today,” she said. “About the fertility treatments. I think I’m ready to start. Actually ready, not just thinking about it.”

I looked at my wife across the dinner table. I looked at her hope, her trust, her complete and reasonable expectation that her husband would meet this moment with matching honesty.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

And she did. And I listened. And somewhere across the city my phone had a sent message in it that I could not take back.

She reached across the table and took my hand. “We’re going to be okay, Ray. I really believe that.” I looked at my wife’s hand over mine and thought about a parking lot and a message and a woman I had spent ten years pretending I was finished with. “Me too,” I said. And wanted it to be true more than I had wanted anything in a long time.