Chapter 2 - Six Days
The wedding was small, fast, and somehow perfect anyway.
Our parents came. A few close friends. Two nurses who'd cared for her long enough to feel like family tied a strip of white ribbon around her bed rail because someone thought the room needed decoration. My mother showed up with a grocery-store cake, blue frosting, my name spelled slightly wrong in icing.
Rosalind wore a white cardigan over her hospital gown. I wore the one suit I owned. When I told her she looked beautiful, she glanced down at her compression socks and raised an eyebrow.
"Very bridal," I said.
"Shut up."
When I slid the ring onto her swollen finger, she looked at it for a long moment.
"My husband," she said.
"My wife."
For a few minutes in that room, she wasn't a patient and I wasn't a caregiver. We were just two people who'd finally said yes to each other.
Six days later, they wheeled her toward surgery with that ring still on.
"I'll see you after," I told her, because I needed to hear myself say it.
"You better."
Those were the last words either of us said.
The surgery didn't go the way anyone prayed it would. One complication became three. Rosalind died at thirty-one, six days into a marriage neither of us had expected to get.
A few weeks later, her family's lawyer, Harold, called me.
"I think you should sit down," he said.
Rosalind had written a will before surgery. Harold started reading it out loud, and I listened, because when an old man's voice starts shaking while he reads your dead wife's last wishes, you don't interrupt.
"To my husband, Nathan, who spent years trying to give me more time when there wasn't any left to give — I leave everything that remains of mine."
Then Harold got to the part that changed everything.
Rosalind's grandfather had set up a family trust decades earlier. She'd inherited a share of it after her father died, but most of it was locked up tight, untouchable, not something she could just pull from to cover a hospital bill. If she died without a spouse, her share went back into the trust for other relatives to split. If she died married, her husband inherited it outright.
Her share, plus a survivorship benefit, came to a little over four hundred thousand dollars.
I sat there holding the phone, not saying anything.
May you like
"She watched me sell my car," I finally said. "She watched me skip a job in Denver. She watched me count out grocery money in a parking lot."
"Keep listening," Harold said gently. "She knew you'd say that."
