PART 1
She said: he’s in the shower, old wife. We’re having the time of our lives in Maui.
A woman laughed into that phone, and the sound carried right across the stillness of that room.
Behind her voice I could hear waves going in along a shore, and the crisp snap of a champagne bottle being opened.
I did not shout. I did not ask who she was.
I have been asked about that more than anything else, and the honest answer is that there was a woman in the bed four feet away and I was not going to have that conversation over her.
I stood beside Veda’s bed holding my phone while twenty years of marriage rearranged themselves in my head.
My name is Saffira and I am fifty-one, and I had not slept properly in nine days.
I want that in here because people assume there was a moment of towering clarity in that room, and there was not. I was so tired I had to hold the bed rail.
Rhydian had told me he was leaving for a critical business trip.
He packed carefully. He complained about the meetings ahead. He kissed my cheek on his way out, and he was irritated when I mentioned that his mother’s condition was getting worse.
He was never at a meeting.
He was in Maui with another woman while his mother lay dying in a hospital bed.
I know the hotel now. It is on a statement. Eleven nights, booked in the January, four weeks before the stroke that put her in that ward.
Four weeks. He booked it while she was still at home, still talking, still asking when he was coming.
The betrayal hurt. I am not going to pretend otherwise and I am also not going to pretend it was the main event.
What cut deepest was understanding that I had spent nearly twenty years being the person who stays when everybody else walks away.
After the strokes I became responsible for almost everything.
Meals. Medication, which is four separate times a day and has been since 2021 — eleven items, two of which have to be crushed.
Bathing. Appointments, which means a wheelchair, a taxi, a waiting room and four hours for eleven minutes with a consultant.
Laundry, which after the second stroke is a different job entirely and I am not going to describe it.
And the long nights, when the anxiety or the confusion kept her awake and she would call out somebody’s name from 1974.
