My Darling Husband(79)

“No, but if you take off that mask, I might.”

His pupils go dark, like a tiny man inside his eyeballs flicked off the lights. From ho-hum hazel to stormy black, just like that.

It’s the last thing I notice before he pulls off the mask.



J A D E


6:52 p.m.


It takes me a minute to place him.

Partly because he’s lost weight since the last time I saw him, a good twenty pounds melted off his limbs and torso and hollowing out his cheeks. His hair is different, too. Shorter. Lighter, almost completely gray.

The other part is because it’s been a few months. I haven’t seen him since the spring.

“I remember you. Except your name wasn’t Sebastian. It was something else.”

Though admittedly, that doesn’t explain the other times.

I close my eyes and try to reconstruct the meetings in my mind, but the only one I can come up with with any sort of certainty was this past April. Him, waving at me through the windows as he climbed the front steps. Me, opening the door to invite him in. He introduced himself, but not as Sebastian, as—

“Bas. You joked that your wife refused to call you that, that she preferred the name ‘Bossy.’ I laughed and said she sounded like a smart woman.” I pause, the obvious question rising in my head. “Which one is it?”

“The only one who calls me Bas is my mother, God rest her soul.”

“Do you even have a wife?”

He shrugs. “I guess, though I haven’t seen or heard from her in years. She could be dead for all I know.”

I don’t respond, mostly because I still don’t know what to believe. There have been so many lies, and if she’s been gone that long, I don’t see how their estrangement could possibly be Cam’s fault. The stories flicker through my head like a disjointed dream, random bits of information he hurled at me over the course of a couple hours. That he grew up in New Orleans, that he moved here after Katrina, that he married his high school sweetheart. The one thing I haven’t forgotten is that this guy was a talker.

Only one detail matches up to the bits and pieces I’ve heard from him today: “You told me about your daughter. You didn’t tell me what was wrong with her, but you said she was sick. That she was dying.”

My words hit him like a slap. He winces, then nods.

A rising high school junior and budding artist, a genius with charcoal and pastels. A sensitive girl with a pretty name.

“Gigi.”

“That’s right.” He looks impressed. “She was named after my grandmother.”

And then, another memory, one that arrives with a sickening spasm. “I promised to help, didn’t I?”

Actually, it’s worse than that. I made a promise to connect him with one of Cam’s regular clients, a board member at Piedmont Hospital. I wrote down Sebastian’s number and asked for a couple of days to connect the two.

And then?

And then I got busy. Running errands and picking up school uniforms at the mall. Meeting friends for lunches and coffees. Carting the kids to violin and soccer and the movies, cooking healthy dinners for my family. I went back to my busy, cushy life, and I didn’t even think about Sebastian and his poor, sweet, sick daughter until many weeks later, when I pulled a wad of lint from the pocket of freshly laundered jeans and connected it to my broken promise.

But it wasn’t too late. I could have tracked Sebastian down. I could have picked up the phone and called that board member. I could have done something.

And yet, I didn’t.

I swallow down a surge of self-loathing. “Jesus... No wonder you hate me and Cam so much.”

Sebastian barks a laugh. “You think?”

“I’m so sorry, Sebastian. I wish I had an excuse, but the truth is, I don’t. All those things I told myself at the time, all the reasons I justified not following through...of course they’re all bullshit. I mean, of course I could have followed through. I should have. But the more time passed, the more I just figured...” I look up at him and I search for the right thing to say, even though I know there’s not a word that exists to make this right.

“You figured what? Spit it out. What did you figure?”

I wince, closing my eyes. “I figured it wouldn’t matter, since our paths would probably never cross again anyway.”

“Even though they’d already crossed a handful of times.” He grimaces, shakes his head. “But of course, you didn’t remember that, either, did you? I was just a stranger with a sorry face and a sad story.”

“I know. And I hate myself for it. If I could go back and change things, I would in a second. The board member’s name is Gordon Howard. He’s in my phone. Let’s call him together, right now.”

“And say what, exactly?”

“That your daughter is sick. That you need help navigating her options. You didn’t tell me what she had, but tonight I heard you mention cystic fibrosis. You said she needed a lung transplant.”

He nods. “Her doctors say they have four, maybe five months left in them, and that’s assuming she doesn’t pick up B. cepacia, which for someone with CF is pretty much a death sentence. She needs that transplant.”

If I wasn’t convinced before that Gigi is Tanya’s niece, I am now. How many sixteen-year-old girls in Atlanta are facing this exact situation? We must be talking about the same person. We must be.