I handed the phone back, my fingers trembling. “She’s… she has a beautiful smile,” I managed to choke out, my voice sounding entirely foreign to my own ears. Just before midnight, the heavy double doors of the cafeteria pushed open.

A surgeon walked in, still wearing his scrubs, his face pale and his posture rigid.

He spotted David and walked over to our table. The air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. “David?” the surgeon asked softly. David stood up, his chair scraping loudly against the linoleum floor. “Yes. How is she? Is she okay?” The surgeon took a deep breath, avoiding direct eye contact for a fleeting second before looking David in the eye.

“I’m so sorry, David. The tumor is much more extensive than the imaging showed. It’s wrapped around the brain stem. We did everything we could, but… we couldn’t remove it. We’re closing her up now. We need to talk about comfort care.” David didn’t scream.

He didn’t cry out. Instead, he just completely crumbled inward, his knees buckling slightly. He reached out blindly, his hand grasping the edge of the table before his fingers found my arm. He grabbed my hand and held onto it with a desperate, crushing grip, as if I were the only thing keeping him from falling into the center of the earth.

“Will you come with me to the consultation room?” he begged, his voice reduced to a fragile, broken whisper. He looked at me with utterly shattered eyes. “Please. I don’t have any family here yet. I can’t hear the rest of this alone.” Every instinct in my body screamed at me to run.

To pull my hand away, tell him exactly what his wife had done to me, and walk away.

But I couldn’t. I wasn’t fifteen anymore, and I wasn’t looking at Tammy Doyle. I was looking at a broken man who was losing his entire world.

I slowly stood up. “Okay,” I whispered. “I’ll walk with you.” We left the cafeteria and began the long, silent walk down the sterile hospital corridor toward the surgical consultation wing. The only sound was the squeaking of our shoes on the polished floor. I walked shoulder-to-shoulder with the man who fiercely loved the woman who had nearly ended my life.

The irony was so heavy it felt hard to breathe. We were about halfway down the hall when David’s steps slowed, and he eventually stopped completely. He stared blankly at the blank white wall, his chest heaving as he tried to process the reality that his wife was going to die.

“She always told me she was living on borrowed time,” David said softly, speaking more to the empty hallway than to me. “She always said she didn’t deserve a good life. That she didn’t deserve me.” I stayed perfectly still, my heart hammering against my ribs.

David wiped a tear from his cheek and let out a shaky breath.