Page 17 of Married to Lies

“There’s a treatment?” I asked, feeling my shoulders drop with relief. Simon’s body wasn’t exactly strong to begin with, and asking it to fight poison couldn’t end well.

The doctor nodded. “It’s a medicine called Prussian blue. This is an oversimplification, but it will collect the poison from his system, and then he’ll excrete it.”

Bryce pressed his fingers into the corners of his eyes. He had to be running on almost no sleep, and I asked, “Will he be okay?”

“Okay?” She tilted her head, eyeing the sleeping man. “He’ll likely have neuropathy in his hands and feet. The numbness and tingling may go away. It may not. He may have tremors for the rest of his life. In time, he’ll have skin lesions, hair loss, lines in his nail beds. It could affect his mind as well, expediting mental decline. Our main concern now is his heart. Both the poison and treatment are hard on it, and with end-stage chronic heart failure...” She shook her head as if to say, It doesn’t look good. “He may be okay.”

“May be?” Bryce echoed.

“We administered our first dose of Prussian blue this morning. He’ll get three doses a day until toxicology reports are within normal levels. I’d like to see how he responds to early treatment before offering a prognosis.”

I nodded, taking it all in. “How long will he be here? Ballpark?”

She looked at Simon again. “A week at least, possibly a month? It really depends.”

For a moment, I forgot how mad I was at Simon for forcing our hands in marriage and felt pity instead. He was meant to be in designer suits, pacing in front of a whiteboard in the conference room like he forgot he was no longer a college professor. Not rotting in a hospital bed in a flimsy gown.

“Do you have any other questions?” the doctor asked.

“I don’t,” Bryce said, then looked at me.

“How soon will we know if the medicine is helping or hurting?”

“We’ll be monitoring daily for the first week,” she said. “I’ll have a solid idea in the next several days.”

“Until then?” I asked.

“We’ll keep him as comfortable as possible. He was pretty dehydrated...” She talked for a while about their plan to replace his fluids and electrolytes, but it all started to become overwhelming. Finally, she said, “I’ll be back again this evening to check his progress.”

After she left, Bryce and I sat back down on opposite sides of Simon. Bryce sent a voice message of the news to Cruz, Aaric, and Jude, and then we were quiet. The information weighed heavy on our shoulders.

I wasn’t sure how much time passed before the sound of shifting sheets drew my attention back to Simon.

His eyes slowly blinked open, pale eyelashes fluttering. It seemed like Bryce and I were both holding our breath to see how he would act.

“Water,” he rasped.

Bryce hurriedly reached for the plastic tumbler on the fake-wood nightstand while I used a button to adjust Simon’s bed, elevating his shoulders.

Simon took a sip from the drink and then coughed. Finally, he said, “Don’t think this means you’re getting out of a wedding, Quentin.”

I looked at Bryce to see if he heard the same thing I had. Bryce pressed his lips together as he held back a laugh.

I groaned. “I can’t tell if you’re a crazy old man or a hopeless romantic.”

Simon gave me a tired smirk. “I’m surprised you don’t already know; the two go hand in hand.”

7 Rei

A couple hours into my first shift back at MyHome, I walked to the wall of Post-it notes in the lobby. They now stretched at least ten feet up the wall and spread thirty feet wide. A bright pink square stood out amongst a sea of standard yellows and oranges, and I read it, intrigued.

You can’t change the world on an empty stomach.

A chuckle rose in my chest. “Amen,” I muttered. A few adjacent notes said things like... Call your mom and tell her you love her. And Bad ideas are just good stories waiting to be told.

My lips quirked, and I eyed a table with a stack of yellow Post-it notes and an assortment of pens. Even as I was watching, an employee I didn’t recognize bent over the table and scribbled a note before finding the barest patch of wall. Soon, it would be so thick with sticky notes, they’d need a ladder to add more.

So many voices already lived on this wall, and it was like seeing all the stars on a clear night in the country. I felt insignificant knowing I was just one small note amongst thousands. One sentence strung together amongst a library full of tomes.