Everything After(30)

“I don’t feel like I do,” he said, lifting his head. “I feel like you’ve been lying to me for years.”

She looked him straight in the eyes. “Ez,” she said. “I didn’t lie to you about anything. I’m still me. I’m still the same person.” Emily thought to apologize for not telling him, but she didn’t. She was sorry he was hurt, but she didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. It was her story.

“It doesn’t feel like you are,” he said, leaning against the back of the chair. “When have you been practicing piano?”

“I haven’t,” she said, simply.

“You can play like that without touching an instrument for more than a decade?” He looked at her incredulously. He’d never looked at her like that before.

“Believe what you want to believe. I’m telling you the truth.” The therapist part of Emily recognized that the trust in their relationship was now broken and needed to be repaired, but she responded before thinking about whether it was the right thing to say.

“I hate that I don’t believe you,” Ezra said. “I hate that you made it so I don’t believe you.”

There was a pause. A moment where they both looked at each other, sized each other up.

“I hate that you don’t believe me, either,” she said, finally. She didn’t want to explain, didn’t want to tell him how many times she’d listened to that song and why. How she’d known how to play it years ago, and that she’d been playing it in her mind all afternoon, imagining her hands on the keys again. She knew she should. Still, she’d answered so many of his questions. It was time for him to answer hers.

“What happened to you at work today?” she asked again.

This time Ezra responded. “Malcolm died,” he said, flatly. “And his mother blamed me. She was hysterical. Her husband had to hold her back. She—she tried to hit me. She said that I killed him, that if I were a better doctor he would still be alive. It was . . . awful.”

“Oh, Ez, I’m so sorry,” Emily said. She thought of Malcolm’s siblings. She thought of the pain they must be in, that his mother must have been in to act that way. And she thought about Ezra, too, how those words had likely confirmed his own feelings, his own failure. Probably made him feel exposed in front of his colleagues. She wondered when he’d cried. Where he’d been. She wanted to hug him, but he’d wrapped his arms around himself, leaving no room for hers. “I wish you’d told me,” she said. “Not just so I would’ve known what to say to Hala, but so I could help you.”

“I didn’t want to upset you even more,” he said. “You’ve been so sad.”

“Are you saying it’s my fault that you didn’t tell me?” That was what it sounded like to her. It was her fault when she kept something from him, and now it was her fault when he kept something from her. Emily tried to get him to look at her, but he was still turned toward the window, at the lights shining bright around the edges of Central Park.

“I don’t know,” Ezra said. “Maybe.”

“I can always take on more for you,” she said. “And I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s wrong. I can’t be there for you.”

He turned to her. “I can’t either, Emily. We could’ve talked about what happened in your past, and how it’s affecting you now. We could’ve walked through that together, instead of you reading in bed alone.”

Emily felt the heat rising in her cheeks. “I wanted to stay home with you, Ez. I wanted us to walk through this together, but you left. You went to work and you left me alone.”

“Em,” he said, “I love you, but other people need me, too. Other people like Malcolm. Children who are dying. How can you stop me from helping them?”

Emily took a deep breath. She realized how differently they felt about this, how differently they looked at it. She had to make him understand. “Our baby was dying, too. It died inside me. And then you disappeared. To me, those cells were a child—one who I imagined learning to walk, learning to talk, going to the playground with, taking trick-or-treating on Halloween. That baby was real to me. There isn’t a hierarchy of loss, Ezra. You can hurt or not hurt, but don’t dismiss my pain.”

Ezra stared at her, as if he didn’t know where to go from there. As if he were about to dismiss her pain again, and now that she’d told him not to, he had nothing else to say.

She thought about her sister, about her mom, about how their love for her seemed unconditional. She wanted to feel that from Ezra, too.

“Do you really want to know all my secrets?” she asked, part of her aware of what she was doing, that she was saying something she knew would upset him in the hope that he would prove his love was unshakable, that their love was bigger than this.

He stared at her for a moment. “Now that I know there are more, how could I say no?” he asked.

It was Emily’s turn to stare out the window into the dark of the night. She pushed forward, not looking her husband in the eye. “My ex-boyfriend, the musician—he wrote a song and it’s on the radio. It’s called ‘Crystal Castle.’ It’s the one I played tonight.”

“I’ve heard that song before . . . it’s about some guy who still loves this woman who . . . wait . . . is it about you?”