Chapter 4: Room 412
St.
Catherine's was twenty minutes from the chapel.
Tom made it in fourteen.
The hospital lobby was white and quiet, the particular quiet of a place where people speak in low voices because they've learned that bad news travels faster than sound.
I carried Lily through the front doors.
She was still half-asleep, her head on my shoulder, her small fingers curled into my jacket.
The woman at the reception desk looked up.
"Claire Ashworth," I said.
"She was admitted this morning.
Room 412."
The woman typed.
Her face gave nothing away.
"Are you family?"
"I'm her fiancé."
A pause.
"I'll need to check with the floor nurse before—"
"Please." I said it quietly.
"We just need to know she's out of surgery."
The woman looked at me.
Then at Lily asleep on my shoulder.
Then she picked up the phone.
Rachel touched my arm.
"Mark."
I turned.
She was looking at a woman walking toward us from the elevator bank — a doctor, still in scrubs, a surgical cap pushed back on her head.
The doctor slowed when she saw Rachel.
"Ms.
Ashworth?"
Rachel stepped forward.
"Yes.
I'm Rachel.
Claire's sister."
The doctor glanced at me, then at Lily.
"Is there somewhere we can sit down?"
My stomach dropped.
"Just tell me," I said.
The doctor looked at me steadily.
"The procedure went well.
She's out of recovery.
She's been asking for you."
The breath I let out was longer than I expected.
Lily stirred on my shoulder.
"Are we there?"
"We're there," I said.
---
Room 412 was at the end of a corridor on the fourth floor.
The door was half open.
Through the gap I could see the edge of a hospital bed, a window with afternoon light coming through the blinds in long pale strips, and a hand resting on the white blanket.
Claire's hand.
I knew it by the small scar on her knuckle from a cooking accident two Christmases ago.
I pushed the door open.
She turned her head.
She was pale and there were lines under her eyes that hadn't been there the last time I saw her, three days ago, when she had kissed me goodbye in our kitchen and told me she'd see me at the altar.
She saw my face.
"Mark," she said.
Her voice had the rasp I knew.
"I'm so sorry."
Lily's head came up from my shoulder.
She looked at Claire.
Then she looked at me.
"That's Claire," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"That's Claire."
Lily slid down from my arms and walked to the side of the bed.
She stood there for a moment, studying Claire's face with the same careful attention she had given Rachel at the altar.
Then she reached out and touched Claire's left ear — gently, with one finger — and found the small V-shaped notch.
She exhaled.
"There it is," she said softly.
Claire's eyes filled.
She reached up and covered Lily's hand with hers.
"I'm sorry I scared you," Claire said.
"You scared Daddy more," Lily said.
Claire looked at me over Lily's head.
I pulled the chair to the side of the bed and sat down.
I didn't know what to say first.
There was too much of it.
So I took her other hand and held it and didn't say anything at all for a moment.
"The letter," she said.
"I read it."
"Are you angry?"
I thought about the chapel.
Rachel at the altar in Claire's dress.
Claire's mother's terrified face.
Two hundred guests.
Lily's trembling finger pointing at a missing notch.
"I'm not angry," I said.
She watched me carefully.
"You should be."
"I know."
"I made a terrible decision."
"You made a scared decision," I said.
"That's different."
She closed her eyes.
A tear ran sideways across her temple and disappeared into her hair.
Rachel appeared in the doorway.
She had changed out of the wedding dress — Tom had gone to the car for her bag — and was standing in a plain gray sweater, looking smaller than she had at the altar.
Claire opened her eyes and saw her sister.
"Did he yell at you?" Claire asked.
"No," Rachel said.
Claire looked back at me.
"You should have yelled at her."
"I told her to come with us," I said.
Claire blinked.
Then she looked at Rachel again.
Rachel gave a small, helpless shrug.
"He's too decent," Rachel said.
"It's honestly a problem."
A sound came out of Claire that was almost a laugh.
She pressed her free hand against her ribs immediately, wincing.
"Don't make me laugh," she said.
"It pulls."
Lily patted her arm.
"Don't laugh then."
"Good advice," Claire said.
The afternoon light shifted through the blinds.
Lily climbed carefully onto the edge of the bed and sat beside Claire's feet, and Claire didn't ask her to move.
Tom stood in the hallway and gave us the room.
Rachel leaned against the doorframe with her arms folded, watching her sister with an expression that had relief in it and guilt in it and love in it, all at once.
For a few minutes nobody said anything important.
Then Claire looked at me and said, "The doctor told me the procedure worked.
But there's a recovery period.
Months, probably.
And there will be monitoring."
"I know."
"It's going to change things."
"I know that too."
She searched my face.
"Mark—"
"Claire." I squeezed her hand.
"I'm not going anywhere."
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then her eyes moved to Lily, sitting quietly at the foot of the bed, and back to me.
"There's something else," she said.
"Something I didn't put in the letter."
Her voice had shifted.
The relief was still there, but underneath it something had tightened.
"The doctor said the condition is hereditary," she said quietly.
"Which means Rachel needs to be tested."
Rachel went very still in the doorway.
"And it means," Claire continued, not looking away from me, "that Lily should be tested too."
The room was quiet.
May you like
Lily looked up from the foot of the bed.
"Tested for what?"
