Page 16 of The Summer Swap

She kept thinking of Jeff in the rose garden. Her new shiny hair. Her plans.

“Theo, the signal is terrible. Your voice sounds weird. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“The guy who just died—it wasn’t some stranger, Kristen. It was Michael.”

“Michael?” Her mind went blank, possibly because the only name in her head right now was Jeff. She rummaged in her memory for a Michael. “Michael who?”

“Our Michael. Michael Dent.”

And she realized that the reason Theo sounded strange was because he was crying. Theo, who never cried about anything, was crying so hard she couldn’t make out his words. Her strong, emotionless husband was so overwhelmed with emotion that it was virtually pouring down the phone.

“Oh, Theo—” The room reeled, and she leaned her shoulders against the wall. “Not Michael.”

Michael Dent had trained at the same time as Theo. They’d done their surgical residency together. He’d been best man at their wedding and Theo had been best man at his. They’d been close to his wife, Trisha, and had taken several vacations together. Michael and Trisha had two kids a little younger than Todd and Hannah. In the early days, Trisha and Kristen had met for lunch once a month and commiserated on the challenges of being married to a surgeon who was married to his job. Trisha had joked that at least they didn’t have to worry about their husbands having affairs, because they didn’t have time. And then Michael had apparently found the time, because three years ago he’d left Trisha for a woman called Candy who he’d met online, which Trisha felt made things worse because it meant he’d been actively looking. She’d vented her feelings in a long phone call to Kristen. He didn’t have time to take the trash out, but he had time to find himself a new woman.

Michael had lost weight, bought a sports car and married Candy. Kristen and Theo had stopped socializing with them. (Even if Kristen could have made it through a whole backyard barbecue without impaling Candy with a chicken skewer, she would have felt too disloyal to Trisha who had been a mess for the first year.)

It was all very awkward because Theo was still loyal to Michael and the two men worked together, but Kristen had seen how close to the edge Trisha was and was adamant that she wasn’t going to make it worse by enveloping Candy into their social circle. In the end they compromised, and Michael and Theo played golf once a month and grabbed a few drinks together occasionally after work.

Kristen hadn’t seen Michael for ages, and now she would never see him again because Michael had been hit by a car. Michael was dead.

What would Trisha think? Trisha had dropped off the radar lately and Kristen suspected she might be seeing someone. She hoped she was. She deserved happiness.

And so did Kristen, but right now her husband was crying, and her lover-to-be was waiting for her in the rose garden with a glass of champagne in his hand, and life was a complicated, unpredictable mess.

“Theo—”

“I try and detach from cases.” Theo was still crying, great thumping sobs that turned his words into something close to unintelligible. “It’s the way I operate—literally—but this was Michael, and he wasn’t just a surgical challenge he was my friend. And the family member waiting for news wasn’t a stranger, it was his wife.”

Kristen thought, Which wife?

“Candy was there?”

“Trisha. She had Lulu and Richard with her. They were dressed in shorts and T-shirts because they’d been waiting for him to come home so they could have a backyard barbecue. They do it once a month to try and keep things civil.”

Kristen remembered Trisha talking about it. I do it for the kids and it almost kills me.

And the reason it almost killed Trisha was because despite everything that had happened, she still loved Michael and playing happy families had been torture.

“How was Trisha?” If this had happened a few years earlier when Michael had just met Candy, Kristen might have suspected Trisha of being the one who had T-boned the car.

“Distraught. She threw herself at me and said Tell me you saved him, Theo, and I almost told her I had because I so badly wanted it to be true. Instead I had to tell them that there would be no more backyard barbecues, and the whole time I was talking I was wondering how many barbecues Michael had missed over the years because he was working and if he would have got himself to more had he known he had a limited number, and I tried to remember the last time I was present for a whole family meal.”

“Don’t think about that now. It’s not the time.”

“It’s the perfect time.” He was still crying, and Kristen realized that she was crying, too.

She was crying for Michael, who had been a sweet and kind man before he’d decided to leave his wife, and she was crying for Trisha, who had now lost Michael twice, and for their kids, who would go through the rest of their lives without a father present for their key moments. She was crying for Theo, who hadn’t been able to save his friend and maybe she was crying for herself because she was poised on the edge of a new and better life, and she could feel herself being dragged back inside the confines of the old one.

She tried to calm him down.

“It doesn’t matter that you missed a few family meals. You and Michael are both dedicated surgeons. This is who you are, Theo. And your families accept that because we’re proud of what you do.” She realized she’d used the present tense, which was correct for Theo but not for Michael, who was now in the past tense.

One unpredictable event and suddenly you were moved into the past tense. Life was brutal.

“What if I don’t want to be this person anymore, Kristen? What if I don’t want to prioritize strangers over my own family? Michael was on his way to work. If he’d stayed home with his family, he’d be alive now. What if I don’t want to be the guy who misses the barbecue. What if I want to be the guy who is there for his kids?”

What about being the man who is there for his wife?

---