I married a stranger from a hospital waiting room so he wouldn’t d*e alone — after our one-week marriage, his lawyer handed me his backpack, saying, “He wanted you to know the truth.”

He said: “One thousand one hundred and forty.”

For the next seven days, I never left his side.

I want to describe the seven days, because they were a marriage and I’ve stopped letting anyone tell me otherwise.

We talked for four of them.

He was lucid until Thursday, and in those four days I learned more about Alden Voss than I know about people I’ve had in my life for a decade — not because he told me about himself, which he barely did, but because of how he was with the staff.

He knew all of their names.

Every nurse, both night techs, the woman who brought the trays, and the man who mopped at eleven — Efraín, who had a daughter starting community college and about whom Alden asked, every single night, by name, in Spanish, badly.

On the third night I said, “How do you know everyone?”