Chapter 11: After
Six months later, I was back on the night shift.
I had requested it.
The hospital at 2 a.m.
has a particular quality — quieter, more focused, the kind of work that requires your whole mind and leaves no room for anything else.
I had always loved it.
Julian had always hated that I loved it.
He called it my way of avoiding real life.
It was, in fact, my real life.
I was charting at the nurses' station when my phone lit up with a text from Diane.
*"Serena and I are getting dinner Friday.
Come if you want.
No pressure."*
I looked at the message for a moment.
Then I typed back: *"What time?"*
Her reply came immediately: *"Seven.
Bring nothing.
Serena is already planning to bring too much."*
I set the phone down and went back to my chart.
---
My father came for dinner on a Sunday in October.
He brought groceries and cooked, which he had done every Sunday since I was seven years old and my mother had decided she had better things to do with her Sunday afternoons than stand over a stove.
He made arroz con pollo and we ate at my kitchen table and he talked about a case he was consulting on, and I talked about a patient who had made a full recovery from something the overnight team had nearly missed, and neither of us mentioned Julian or Victoria or the settlement or any of it.
At the end of the evening, when he was putting on his coat, he stopped and looked at me.
"You seem like yourself," he said.
"I am myself," I said.
He nodded once, satisfied, and went home.
---
The weighted blanket was still at the foot of the bed.
I had thought about getting rid of it several times.
It was a good blanket.
It had cost him a lot.
It had been a genuine gift, bought because he had paid attention to something real about me, and that attention had been real even if everything built on top of it had not been.
I kept it.
Not because of him.
Because I still had insomnia sometimes, and it still helped, and I saw no reason to let him take that from me too.
---
On a Friday evening in November, I met Diane and Serena at a small Italian place in the West Village.
Serena had brought a bottle of wine she had been saving for a good occasion.
Diane had brought nothing, as promised, and spent the first ten minutes loudly defending this decision.
We sat at a corner table and ate and talked for three hours.
We talked about work and about the city and about Diane's daughter, who had just started kindergarten and had opinions about everything, and about Serena's business, which was expanding into a second location.
We talked about what we had each needed to hear at the beginning and hadn't been told.
We talked about what we would say to a younger version of ourselves if we could.
At one point, Serena poured the last of the wine and held up her glass.
"To Arthur," she said.
"Unlikely hero."
Diane raised hers.
"To Patricia."
I raised mine.
"To the table," I said.
They both looked at me.
"Someone had to flip it," I said.
Diane laughed first.
Then Serena.
Then me, and I didn't stop for a long time, and the sound of it in that small warm restaurant felt like something returning to its right place after a long time away.
---
Walking home that night, I passed a flower stand on the corner of Bleecker Street.
The vendor was closing up, loading buckets into the back of a van.
He saw me looking and held out a small bunch of white freesias — the last ones, slightly past their best.
"Two dollars," he said.
"Otherwise they go in the bin."
I gave him two dollars.
I carried them home and put them in a glass on the kitchen counter.
They were a little battered and slightly wilted and they were mine, and in the morning they still smelled like something good.
---
*Some people stay in rooms that hurt them because they've been taught that leaving is the most frightening thing.
Clara learned, in one morning, that it isn't.
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