Five months after chemotherapy, I surprised my husband with a trip to the hotel where we’d honeymooned 20 years earlier. I wanted to feel like his wife again\u2014not his patient. But when Jeffrey saw the king-size bed, his face fell. Then he paid for another room, and I thought I knew why.<\/p>\n
I stood before the bathroom mirror at home, examining what chemotherapy had left behind.<\/p>\n
I stared at the inch of fuzzy hair.<\/p>\n
The scars on my chest.<\/p>\n
The loose skin I still couldn’t look at for long.<\/p>\n
I hadn’t felt this unattractive since I was a teenager.<\/p>\n
“You’re overthinking it again,” I whispered to my reflection.<\/p>\n
Five months earlier, I’d finished my last round.<\/p>\n
The woman in our wedding photos had thick auburn hair and a body she’d never thought twice about.<\/p>\n
This woman was a stranger.<\/p>\n
But I wanted to celebrate my victory over cancer.<\/p>\n
Even if it had come with a heavy cost.<\/p>\n
And I wanted our twentieth anniversary to be special.<\/p>\n
I wanted one weekend where my husband, Jeffrey, saw me as his wife instead of his patient.<\/p>\n
So I returned to the bedroom and booked it in secret.<\/p>\n
The same mountain hotel where we’d spent our honeymoon twenty years earlier.<\/p>\n
“What are you smiling about?” Jeffrey asked from the bedroom doorway<\/p>\n
Nothing,” I said, closing the laptop too quickly.<\/p>\n
“That’s the face of a woman planning something.”<\/p>\n
I turned to him.<\/p>\n
“Maybe I am. Clear your calendar next weekend.”<\/p>\n
He hesitated.<\/p>\n
It was small, just a flicker.<\/p>\n
But I noticed it.<\/p>\n
“Next weekend?” he repeated.<\/p>\n
“It’s our twentieth anniversary, Jeffrey. I want to celebrate properly.”<\/p>\n
“Where are we going?”<\/p>\n
“That’s a surprise,” I said. “All you need to do is pack a nice shirt.”<\/p>\n
He shifted his weight.<\/p>\n
One hand tugged at the hem of the oversized flannel he’d been living in lately.<\/p>\n
“You’ve been buying a lot of those big shirts,” I said, half teasing.<\/p>\n
“They’re comfortable,” he answered, and stepped back into the hallway.<\/p>\n
I let it go.<\/p>\n
I let everything go those days.<\/p>\n
Honestly, I was too busy fighting my own war in the mirror.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
That night I packed a new dress.<\/p>\n
I folded it carefully beneath my sweaters so he wouldn’t see.<\/p>\n
“Do you still think I’m beautiful?” I asked him later, lying in the dark.<\/p>\n
You know I do,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Say it like you mean it.”<\/p>\n
There was a pause I didn’t understand then.<\/p>\n
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known,” he said quietly. “That never changed.”<\/p>\n
I wanted to believe him.<\/p>\n
Through every treatment, he’d held my hand and told me the same thing.<\/p>\n
But a cruel little voice kept whispering that he’d only stayed because a good man doesn’t leave a dying wife.<\/p>\n
“Jeffrey?”<\/p>\n
Hmm?”<\/p>\n
“Are you happy? With me. Still.”<\/p>\n
He rolled toward me.<\/p>\n
I felt him hesitate before he answered.<\/p>\n
A man choosing his words around something fragile.<\/p>\n
“Happier than I deserve,” he said.<\/p>\n
I didn’t ask what he meant.<\/p>\n
I was afraid of the answer.<\/p>\n
“Get some sleep,” he murmured. “You have a surprise weekend to survive.”<\/p>\n
I laughed softly and closed my eyes.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
The next morning he disappeared into the bathroom to get dressed, his clothes bundled under his arm.<\/p>\n
He’d been doing that for months.<\/p>\n
“You can change out here, you know,” I called. “I’ve seen you before.”<\/p>\n
“Old habits,” he said through the door.<\/p>\n
I remember rolling my eyes.<\/p>\n
I remember thinking he was being ridiculous.<\/p>\n
I was so certain that this trip would fix everything broken between us.<\/p>\n
I was unaware that my grand romantic gesture was about to trigger a crisis.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
The elevator ride to the third floor felt endless.<\/p>\n
I kept smoothing the front of my blouse like a nervous girl on a first date.<\/p>\n
I had done it.<\/p>\n
I had brought us back to the place where everything began.<\/p>\n
I slid the key card into the lock and pushed the door open.<\/p>\n
I expected Jeffrey to laugh, or maybe pull me close the way he used to.<\/p>\n
Instead, he froze in the doorway.<\/p>\n
His eyes went straight past me.<\/p>\n
His gaze fixed on the enormous king-size bed in the center of the room.<\/p>\n
I laughed, though it came out thin and shaky.<\/p>\n
“That’s usually the idea on an anniversary, sweetheart.”<\/p>\n
He didn’t laugh back.<\/p>\n
He stood there, one hand strangling the<\/p>\n
“Jeffrey?” I stepped toward him. “What’s wrong?”<\/p>\n
“Nothing,” he said too quickly. “The room is beautiful. You did a beautiful thing.”<\/p>\n
But he wouldn’t look at me.<\/p>\n
I walked to the window and pulled back the curtain, showing him the view of the pines we’d fallen in love with two decades earlier.<\/p>\n
“Remember this?” I said softly. “We stood right here the first morning. You said you’d never seen anything more beautiful.”<\/p>\n
“I remember,” he murmured.<\/p>\n
Then he cleared his throat and did the thing I never saw coming.<\/p>\n
I turned around slowly.<\/p>\n
“What did you say?”<\/p>\n
“A second room,” he repeated, still not meeting my eyes. “Down the hall. I’ll sleep better on my own. I’ve been restless lately, tossing all night. I don’t want to keep you awake.”<\/p>\n
I stared at him, waiting for the punchline that never arrived.<\/p>\n
“Jeffrey, this is our anniversary. We came all this way. Why would you sleep in a different room?”<\/p>\n
“It’s just for sleeping,” he said. “We’ll still have dinner. We’ll still spend the days together.”<\/p>\n
“The days,” I echoed.<\/p>\n
Something inside me went cold and quiet.<\/p>\n
“You don’t want to sleep next to me,” I said.<\/p>\n
“That’s not what this is.”<\/p>\n
“Then what is it?”<\/p>\n
He turned around.<\/p>\n
“I can’t explain it right now. Please, just trust me.”<\/p>\n
“Trust you?” My voice cracked. “You’re walking out of our anniversary room and asking me to trust you?”<\/p>\n
He looked back at me.<\/p>\n
His eyes were pleading, but he said nothing.<\/p>\n
He walked away.<\/p>\n
I sank onto the edge of the bed.<\/p>\n
Every ugly thought I’d been fighting for five months came flooding in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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