Part 3
He can tell she's done this before. Everything is textbook—the concerned face, compassionate tone, the hand-wringing. He hates it. it makes him feel like Grieving Widower #6 as she faces him awkwardly, her eyes full of sympathy.
But—
Not just sympathy.
No.
Pity.
It seems wrong, somehow, that she's pitying him, when just so recently he'd had the upper hand.
(His palm meets her cheek—the first physical contact in more than two decades—and the pity vanishes from her eyes.)
That's better.
*
She runs away (now who's the coward?) and leaves him shaking in the lobby. He can feel eyes on him, critical eyes, but he's lost to the words repeating in his head.
The words tell him that it happened. That his wife—his real one, the one who actually liked him—is dead.
And it's not surprising, once he thinks about it a minute. Not really. It's certainly fitting.
Of course she had to go by surgery. Death by surgery. Oh, sure, they can throw medical terms at him until they're blue in the face but it doesn't change the fact that his eldest daughter watched his wife die and she did fuck-all to stop it from happening.
He wouldn't be surprised if she didn't mind eliminating the woman that took her own mother's place in his life.
He starts after her, vision blurred by salty drops of fear and anger, needing to see her, to see the words, to hear it again. We did everything we could. He needed to hear it to refresh his fury, because everyone knows that fury can be twice as powerful as grief and half as painful to be left alone with. He needs to hear it so that he can direct himself, direct his fear and his sadness, at the responsible parties.
We did everything we could.
It's not bad enough that she's a surgeon; no, she has to be a liar as well.
He's starting to think of them as the same thing.