Chapter 1 - The Answer She Kept Giving Me
I knew Rosalind was sick when we met, but at twenty-seven, I didn't actually believe illness could take someone that alive away from me.
She had a rare autoimmune disease, the kind with a name most people mispronounced on the first try. Somehow she made hospitals feel almost normal. She joked with the nurses. She named her IV pole Stanley and introduced him to visitors like he was a difficult relative. Three weeks into dating her, I texted her goodnight and my thumb slipped — "Rosemary" instead of "Rosalind." She sent back four laughing emojis and a photo of her rolling her eyes. The name stuck anyway.
As her condition worsened, I became her ride, her company, her second set of hands. I sat through appointments that ran two hours long. I learned to read blood work results before the doctor did. When the fear got too heavy for her to hold by herself, I held it with her.
Eighteen months in, I proposed. We were sitting on my apartment floor eating cold Chinese takeout after a three-day hospital stay, and I just said it, no ring, no plan, because I couldn't wait anymore.
Rosalind cried.
For one second I thought that meant yes.
"No," she said, so quietly I almost missed it.
She told me she loved me too much to marry me. If she died, she didn't want me left holding medical debt and a dead wife's paperwork before I turned thirty.
I told her we could talk to lawyers, figure it out.
She shook her head.
I proposed again six months later. Again on our third anniversary. Same answer every time. Eventually I stopped asking — not because I wanted her any less, but because loving her meant listening to her.
By the time we hit our thirtieth year, her illness ran the schedule for both of us. I cut my hours at work. I canceled a trip to Denver for a job that would've doubled my salary, because she couldn't leave her doctors and I couldn't leave her. I drained most of what I'd been saving toward a house.
"You're spending your whole future on me," she said once, watching me pay a hospital bill from my phone.
"You are my future."
Four years after we met, her doctors recommended a surgery. Dangerous, but with real odds of giving her a life back. A week before it, Rosalind reached for my hand from her hospital bed.
"Nathan. Marry me."
I just stared at her.
"What changed?" I finally asked, because after four years of no, I needed to understand the yes.
She looked down at our hands instead of at me.
"I might not make it through this. And if I don't, I want to die as your wife. Not your girlfriend."
I told her she was going to survive this. That she'd beaten worse odds than this.
May you like
"And if I do," she said, the smallest smile breaking through, "then we'll already be married. Efficient."
I laughed first. Then I cried. Then, three seconds later, I said yes.
