The nurse's face softened with pity. She swallowed whatever else she'd meant to say and pulled the door shut behind her.
I picked up my phone again.
A few messages from Phineas waited on the screen.
I opened them. Photos, the backdrop an upscale steakhouse.
In them, Phineas looked relaxed, his expression soft and warm.
Then a voice message. The moment I tapped it, Mona's chirping voice filled the ward:
"Beryl, I'm so sorry! Phineas said since it's my first time in Searborough, he just had to show me around so I wouldn't leave with any regrets."
The noise made me wince, and I instinctively turned the volume down.
I looked at the photos again.
A romantic candlelit dinner. Elegant plating.
But sitting on the table was a plastic cup of mango dessert balls, jarringly out of place.
It hit me then, the memory of last month, when I'd started the new medication.
My tongue had gone bitter, and I couldn't help calling Phineas, complaining in a small voice.
I told him the side effects were brutal. Not just the bone-deep exhaustion. Even breathing tasted bitter. I said I'd kill for those mango dessert balls from the cart outside our old college.
He listened quietly, then cut me off in his gentlest tone:
"Beryl, I'm not in Searborough. How am I supposed to buy them? Don't be so spoiled."
"Just wait till I'm back, okay? Good girl."
I believed him. I thought Phineas was out there working for our future.
The mango dessert balls I never got to taste, the tenderness and care I waited for and never received, all of it had fallen into Mona's lap instead.
On the screen, Phineas's profile photo was still a picture of the two of us.
In it, the way he looked at me brimmed with love.
Maybe he really had loved me.
He'd just changed his heart. And now that love was like a dessert past its expiration date.
Nothing left but bitterness.
It wasn't until the dead of night that Phineas came back to the ward.
He still reeked of alcohol.
He took the folding cot from the cabinet and set it up with practiced ease.
All those nights at my bedside had carved the habit into him, one he couldn't shake.
Phineas peeled off his coat and draped it over the edge of the cot. A woman's perfume drifted off it, cloying and sweet, not the scent I ever wore.
I turned my head and watched him without a word.
"Still awake?" His voice was hoarse. "My fault. I shouldn't have kept Mona out so late."
His apology felt like checking off a task.
"I'm not angry," I said softly.
Phineas seemed to relax. He sat on the edge of the bed and reached to take my hand.
I shifted just slightly, slipping away without making anything of it.
"Phineas, I need surgery."
The words weren't even fully out before his face changed. It went cold in an instant.
"You just can't let Mona go, can you? You know she's timid, that she's scared of surgery, and you're still bent on forcing her to donate?"
Understanding crashed over me in a single beat.
Phineas had it all wrong. He'd already convicted me before I'd said a thing.
He thought I'd brought up the surgery now to use the match as leverage, to strong-arm Mona into donating her marrow.
In his mind, I was no longer the fiancée who needed his protection.
I was a shameless woman who would coerce someone else.
"I didn't force her." My voice was light as a feather, threaded with a trace of exhaustion. "Every volunteer in the registry has to sign an agreement. They're there by choice."
"Phineas, you say she's timid. Then have you ever stopped to think? Would a timid girl run off to a strange city with a man she's known all of three months?"
When the words faded, the ward went so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
Phineas's profile looked hard in the moonlight, nothing like his usual warmth.
"Beryl." He was clearly holding back his anger. "When did you become this selfish? Slandering someone just to serve your own agenda."
