My sister has done eleven of them.
Eleven Thursdays. She takes the morning off work — unpaid, four of them — and drives forty minutes each way.
She sits in that chair by that water machine for between one and three hours. And then she drives home and goes to work in the afternoon.
She has never once brought my name up with him. Not in eleven Thursdays.
Except one time, in the September, when she asked him directly whether he was going to tell me.
And I asked her, standing in that corridor with my coat still on and my keys in my hand, what he had said back to that.
And my sister looked at the floor for about four seconds.
And then she told me.
PART 4
He said: "She can't do hospitals."
Five words. About his own wife. To his wife's sister. In a corridor in September.
Five words.
