The Measure(46)

“Oh no, Claire, no.”

Then came the worst.

“It wasn’t mine,” she said, barely louder than a whisper.

“What do you mean?”

“Mine was long,” she said. “It was yours that . . .” Claire’s words melted into heavy sobs.

“Wait . . . let me get this straight.” Ben’s mind was spinning as he spoke. What exactly did she do? She had looked at her string, that much was clear. But she said that hers was long.

It was his that made her cry.

“Oh god.” He thought he might vomit.

“Please don’t be mad at me,” Claire whimpered. “When I saw that mine was long, I just assumed that yours would be, too! I honestly didn’t even think it was possible that it wasn’t.”

Ben shut his eyes and tried to breathe steadily, but he was choking on the air.

“How the hell could you do that?” he shouted. He didn’t realize his voice could hold so much anger. “It’s one thing to look at yours, but you had no right to look at mine!”

“I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Ben stayed silent for several minutes, while Claire cried in the chair across from him, hugging herself tightly. There was simply too much happening, there were too many blows for him to process.

He was trying to focus on her betrayal.

That was safer ground than thinking about what she had seen.

“I wanted so badly for them to be the same. For us to share our lives together,” Claire said. “I hope you know that.”

He finally had to ask. “How short was it?”

“Mid-forties,” she said, her voice hoarse and cracking. “That new website isn’t perfectly . . . exact.”

Mid-forties.

That gave him fourteen, maybe fifteen more years.

But he would think about that later. Run the calculations later.

For now, he needed to deal with the present crisis, his relationship rupturing right in front of him.

“If you really love me, then why are you leaving? Especially now?” Ben asked.

“Please . . .” Claire hid her face behind her hands.

Ben stared at her, his vision blurring. “Don’t you owe me that much?”

Claire took a breath, trying to regain her composure. “I just can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t stay with you and have a countdown clock ticking away the whole time. I’ll go crazy.” She peered at him, her eyes anguished. “I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I’m truly sorry, Ben.”

He felt like a tiny sailboat in the middle of a storm surge, and he needed something solid, some anchor for his mind to latch on to, if only for a moment. Ben looked down at Claire’s trembling hands on the table. He had held them so many times in the past year and a half, on long walks and in bed, their fingers easily interlaced. He recognized the chipped purple nail polish as one of her favorites. Lucky Lavender, or maybe Lucky Lilac. It was one of the two.

Claire must have noticed him watching her fingers, because she looked down at them, too. And they both kept looking at her shaking hands, because they couldn’t look at each other.



But now Ben was staring at his own hands, wrapped around the grip of the club.

“You okay there, Ben?” Maura called over her shoulder.

Another man might have imagined Claire’s face on the golf ball and struck it with all his strength. But Ben didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to hurt Claire.

He could blame her for betraying him, for not allowing him the chance to choose for himself. But he couldn’t really blame her for leaving.

Claire had said it herself, she wasn’t strong enough. She needed security, stability. A lifetime guarantee. It was just who she was, and plenty of other people would have reacted the same. Perhaps most people would have. That didn’t make them bad people. And spending the rest of his life simmering in bitterness and spite wouldn’t do anyone any good.

Ben needed to look forward now, not behind.

He squinted at the darkening horizon, where the last slivers of the sun were burning off in a small swirl of fire above the Hudson, like the bonfires on the beaches in Europe, swallowing the strings in their flames.

Then Ben squared his shoulders, swung his arms, and sent the ball soaring toward the river.





Hank




After he had shown Ben and Maura the basics, Hank didn’t feel quite as interested in teeing up himself. So he took a seat on one of the benches with a view of the range, watching the tiny white dots dash across the green like shooting stars. The sunset coated everything with a mystical tint, and even the Hudson River below, so often derided by locals, struck Hank as quite beautiful now, its dark ripples tinted pink.

The water reminded Hank of a young woman he had once seen at New York Memorial, sitting on a bed in one of the pre-op rooms. The tips of her long black hair were dyed bright pink, the way that a few of the girls on Hank’s block growing up used to dip their hair in Kool-Aid.

“She’s waiting for a transplant,” Anika said, coming up behind him and offering him a coffee.

It was late May, one of his final days at the hospital and the first that felt like a return to normalcy after the shooting on the fifteenth. The ER had remained vacant for several days after, even once the police had finished their sweep, most patients preferring to travel a few minutes farther to a hospital that wasn’t a crime scene. But the city’s memory proved remarkably short, and the waiting room was back to capacity by the end of the month, Hank finding only a brief interlude to visit Anika upstairs.