Page 94 of You Loved Me Once
“You don’t know what we were like. You don’t know how perfect she is...was. Fuck, she was. She’s isn’t anything anymore. I need to know what happened in there.”
I close my eyes in sadness. “It doesn’t matter.”
He gets to his feet. “I need answers, Ren. You’re the only one that has them.”
Apologizing isn’t going to bring her back, and I remember when my mother died, I wanted to punch everyone who said it. Things like ‘they’re in a better place,’ or ‘at least she’s not suffering anymore’ don’t make the person in agonizing grief feel any solace in their loss. Those words only comfort the speaker, and I won’t do that to him.
The best thing I can do is let him know something real about her final moments.
“You should sit down,” I tell him and he listens.
We sit here, and I recount the surgery in a clinical way. As each moment, decision, and adjustment I made come back to me. I relay them, hoping he’ll see how hard I tried. He listens with tears streaming down his face when I get to the part where her heart rate dropped. I work hard to keep myself together and just give him the facts.
When I’m finished, we both sit here in silence, letting it fall around us as soundless tears fall from my eyes. Bryce’s hand touches mine, and I rest my head on his shoulder. I’m grieving the loss of Allison Brown, not just my patient, but a beautiful woman who, even though the circumstances brought us together in the most bizarre way, I am sad to have lost. She was graceful, kind, and in the short time I knew her, learned more about me than many patients do in years.
I lift my head and give him something I hadn’t planned on, but think he should know. “She knew,” I tell him.
“Knew what?”
I pull my hand back. “About us. About who I am and what we were.”
He jerks upright. “No, she didn’t.”
“Yeah, she did, Bryce. She knew from the day she walked into that hospital.”
“She never said a word.”
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Right before we put her under, she told me. She said she was curious about me, found the trial, and came. She told me about her love for you as opposed to what we shared and,” I start to cry again. “She said, ‘until my last breath.’”
He moves toward me, gripping my arms and shaking me. “Don’t lie to me.”
The tears fall and I push away. “I’m not lying. She said that if something happened to her...” I don’t know how to finish it. I have no idea what she really wanted me to do.
Did she want me to look out for him? Love him? Marry him? None of these questions were supposed to need answers.
“To do what?” he asks as he gets to his feet.
“I don’t know, I really don’t.”
Bryce’s chest puffs in and out as he struggles for breath. “I’m so lost, Chick.”
“I can’t imagine,” I say as I stand before him.
“I thought losing you was the worst pain I’d ever been in.” He laughs once. “I had no idea.”
I’m the one who has inflicted this on him—twice. “I never wanted to hurt you.”
He looks down at me with tears in his blue eyes. “I know that.”
“Do you?”
He nods.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell him.
Bryce starts to break down and I pull him into my arms. He’s someone I once cared very deeply about and it hurts me to see him like this. I think about how I felt when my mother passed, and I had family to lean on, but he has no one here but me.
He pulls back, his eyes glistening, and then he leans in, pressing his lips to mine. He grips my face, holding me to him, kissing me hard, and I completely freeze.
