The apartment was small and bare. There was a couch with a blanket and pillow on it, like he’d been sleeping there instead of the bed. A little TV was playing an old baseball game with the sound off. On the kitchen counter, there were a dozen orange pill bottles lined up in a neat row. There was a stack of pamphlets next to them. I could read the top one from where I was standing.
“Living with Huntington’s Disease: A Guide for Patients and Families.”
Next to the pamphlets was a framed photograph. It was our wedding picture. The one that used to hang in our hallway at home. I hadn’t even noticed it was missing.
I turned around to face him.
He was standing by the door with his back against it, like he wanted to make sure he had a way out.
“How long were you going to do this?” I asked.
“Claire…”
“How long, Greg? A year? Five years? Were you just going to sit in this apartment and fall apart all by yourself until somebody found you on the floor?”
“I was going to move,” he said quietly. “Somewhere far away. Arizona, maybe. Somewhere you wouldn’t have to see it.”
“See what?”
“Me.” His voice cracked. “See me become him.”
He pulled his hand out of his pocket and held it up between us. The fingers were jerking and twisting.
“Look at this, Claire. Look at it. I can’t make it stop. Some days I can’t hold a fork. Last week I fell down the stairs out there. I’ve been forgetting words. I sat in a meeting at work and forgot my boss’s name. Ted Morrison. I’ve known Ted Morrison for nineteen years.”
He was crying now. Openly. Tears running down his face and into his beard.
“And it’s going to get worse. It only ever gets worse. In five years, I might not be able to walk. In ten, I might not be able to talk. I’m going to scream at you for no reason. I’m going to forget your name. I’m going to need you to feed me and wipe me and…”
He couldn’t finish.
“I watched you with your mother,” he said finally. “I watched what it did to you. You were a ghost that whole year. You barely slept. You barely ate. You lost so much weight that I was scared you’d get sick too. And that was one year, Claire. One year. This could be fifteen. Twenty.”
“That’s my decision to make.”
“No, it’s not!” he shouted. Then he winced, like the shouting had scared him. Like he didn’t know where it had come from. “It’s not. Because you’d say yes. You’d say yes without even thinking about it. You’d give up the whole rest of your life for me, and I’d have to watch you do it, and I can’t. I won’t. Elliot’s mom gave up everything, and it killed her. I’m not going to let that happen to you.”
“So you lied to me.”
“Yes.”
“You lied to Sophie.”
“Yes.”
“You let me think you stopped loving me.”
He slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor with his knees up to his chest.
“I never stopped loving you,” he whispered. “Not for one second. Not ever.”
I walked over and sat down on the floor next to him.
“I know that, you stupid man,” I said. “I’ve always known that. That’s why I couldn’t sleep for a month. Because nothing you said ever made any sense.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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