PART 1
I was twenty-nine and fourteen months into losing my mother.
Volunteering at Halloway General was the only thing that made any of it feel like it was going somewhere. For most of a year I sat with patients who had nobody.
That is the entire job and people always want it to be more than it is. You sit. You are not medical and you do not fix anything and about half the time you are not spoken to at all.
Absalom Renner came onto that ward in the September.
Seventy-two, heart failure, tired in a way that went past his face and into how he held his hands.
Nine days, and in nine days he had no visitors, no cards and no photographs on that windowsill. The nurses had him down as one of mine within about four hours.
But he smiled whenever I came in — properly, like it was a good part of the day — and by the second afternoon we were talking for an hour at a stretch.
We talked about my mother. I want that noted early, because it matters later and because at the time I thought I was the one steering it.
He asked good questions. Where she was from, what she did, whether she had been ill for long. He asked them the way an interested old man asks things and I answered every single one of them in detail across nine days.
On the third day he reached over and took my hand.
He said: marry me, Clemency.
My heart went properly. I said Absalom, you are very ill and we barely know each other.
And he said: I don’t want the state handling my last hours. I would like to leave as somebody’s husband and not as a file with a number on it.
I knew exactly how strange it was. I want that in the record because everybody assumes I was swept along by something, and I was not.
I sat in the hospital car park for forty minutes. I rang my friend Marlowe and said it out loud to hear how it sounded, and it sounded insane, and she said so.
Then I went back up and said yes.
I asked him one question first and I am glad of it, because it is the only moment in those nine days where I can honestly say I was not being led.
I asked him whether there was anybody else who ought to be told.
And he said no.
He said it without a pause and without looking away, and it was a lie, and he had two adult children and four grandchildren at that moment, and one of them lived forty minutes from that hospital.
I did not know that. But I want the lie in the record at the point where it was told, rather than saved up for a reveal, because a great many people have since asked me whether I had any warning.
That was the warning. I got one and it took him about a second and a half and I accepted it, because a man in a hospital bed says there’s nobody and you do not cross-examine him.
I have thought about what I would have done if he had said: yes, two, and they will be furious.
I think I would still have said yes.
I think that is the correct answer and I also think he knew it, which is why I cannot decide whether the lie was necessary or simply tidy.
Two days later a chaplain called Ines Bray married us in that room, with a staff nurse called Thandi and a man from the next bay as witnesses.
I wore a yellow jumper because it was what I had on.
We had no ring, so Absalom took the pull-tab off a can of lemonade on his tray table and put it on my finger, and he did it carefully, with both hands, the way you would do a real one.
For the next seven days I did not leave.
I did the nights. I learned which position helped and which did not and which of the night staff would let me use the family room kettle.
I held that man’s hand through every bad hour of it, and there were a lot of them in the last two days, and his heart stopped at twenty past four on a Tuesday morning.
Afterwards I sat in an empty room and could not get over how much silence somebody I had known for nine days could leave behind.
Then an old man came in with a green backpack.
He said: Clemency? I’m your husband’s lawyer. He left this for you.
He put it in my hands and the first thing that registered was the weight. It was heavy the way a bag full of paper is heavy — dense, not solid.
He looked at my face for a second and then dropped his voice.
He said: Absalom wasn’t who you thought he was.
He said: he wanted you to know the truth. He wasn’t a man dying alone with nothing. He was one of the wealthiest men in this state.
And then: and he chose you on purpose.
PART 2
