The brass bell at the infusion center was cold under my hand. I rang it three times—loud, clear, triumphant. The nurses clapped. Other patients cheered. I turned to my wife, Elena, expecting to see tears of joy.
She was smiling, but it was a tight, practiced smile. The kind you wear for a photo op.
“We did it,” I choked out, hugging her. “It’s over.”
“Yes,” she said, patting my back stiffly. “It’s over.”
The car ride home was quiet. I attributed it to exhaustion. I had spent the last year fighting a war inside my own body. My wife left me the day I finished chemotherapy.
When we walked into the house, I expected to go to the bedroom and sleep for a week. Instead, I saw suitcases in the hallway.
“Going somewhere?” I asked, confused. “To celebrate?”
Elena took a deep breath. She didn’t look at me. She looked at the suitcases.
“I’m leaving, David.”
I laughed nervously. “What? Leaving? Like… to the store?”
“No. Leaving you.”
I sat down on the bench, my legs suddenly weak—weaker than they had been during the worst of the treatment. “But… I’m better. The doctor said I’m going to make it. We have our whole lives back.”
She finally looked at me, and her eyes were empty. There was no love, no hate, just a terrifying neutrality.
“She said, ‘I stayed because I didn’t want to look like a monster who left a dying man,’” dropping the truth like a stone.
I stared at her. “You… you stayed for appearances?”
“I stayed because you were sick,” she corrected. “I wasn’t going to divorce a cancer patient. Everyone would have hated me. I would have hated myself.”
She zipped up her purse. “‘Now that you’re going to live, I can go.’“.
The cruelty of it was breathtaking. She hadn’t been praying for my recovery; she had been serving a sentence. My illness had trapped her in the marriage, and my survival was the key that unlocked the door.
She walked out to the car. She didn’t look back. She didn’t say goodbye. She just left, her conscience clear because she had put in the hours.
I sat alone in the house that I had fought so hard to return to. I realized that for the last year, while I was fighting to live, she was just waiting for permission to leave. Her pity was the only thing holding our marriage together. And now that I was strong enough to stand on my own, she had finally decided it was safe to knock me down.
