Page 30 of The One Day You Were My Husband
I already loved him by then.
“I really don’t want to leave this flat when you’re here. But I think we should celebrate your exams, even if I’m several months late. Plus, I just want to be out there in the world with you.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, please! Where are you taking me?”
He frowned. “Where are you taking me? With your substantial new paycheck?”
“There are no substantial pay checks in the NHS, so you can get that idea out of your head. Besides, I’m still a core trainee. I don’t start as a registrar until October.”
Johan took his coffee off the stove and there was a pause as I thought about a suitable date.
“Maybe diving?”
He stopped pouring his coffee and turned around. “Really?”
“You’re teaching this evening.”
“And you want to join my class?”
“Yes! We could go for drinks afterward. Food. Normal date stuff.”
Johan drank some coffee. “You said you’d have a panic attack. That you’d never dive. What’s changed?”
“I—I decided to reject that kind of thinking.”
He laughed again. “Of course you did.”
“But I also told myself that a woman like me couldn’t get a registrar number, and then I ranked eleventh in the country. My thinking isn’t always to be trusted.”
We watched each other for a few moments. I was still finding it hard to take my eyes off Johan. To believe that if I blinked, or moved suddenly, he would not disappear.
“Before I agree to anything, I want you to tell me what kind of student you are,” Johan said.
“An excellent one! I concentrate hard and take notes.”
“Of course you do. But what I really want to know is, how are you when you don’t get it straight away?”
“Oh, terrible. But I’m really good at pretending to fail with grace. You’d never know I was dying inside.”
From somewhere nearby the disquieting wail of an ambulance, dodging through Whitechapel, seeped into Johan’s kitchen.
He came over to get my bowl. He’d made porridge earlier with apple sauce and cinnamon, brown sugar laced across the surface. It had been exactly what I’d needed for a long day in theater, and exactly what I would never have taken the time to do for myself.
“You always leave a bite of food on your plate,” he said, stopping by the table. “What is that?”
I looked at the single spoonful left in my bowl and told him—truthfully—that I had no idea.
Johan smiled as if to say,I know exactly why that is, but did not enlighten me. He took my single remaining spoonful of porridge and ate it, before adding it to the washing up.
“Let me talk to the dive school and check they’re OK with me teaching someone I know,” he said. Then he turned around. “And for what it’s worth, I would most definitely know you were dying inside. You’re a lot more transparent than you think, Carrie Cole.”
I shut my laptop. Yanika had arranged with one of her colleagues in hepatobiliary for me to assist on a Whipple’s procedure that morning and I’d been reading up. I hadn’t observed one since med school, and it was a complex operation.
I’m not transparent at all, I thought, zipping the laptop back into its sleeve. It was one of the things that drove Dell mad.Nobody knows what’s going on in there, she’d say.You have to tell us, Carrie.
It was simply that Johan could read me in a way nobody else seemed to.
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