“What are the chances he’ll go back to being the way he was, that everything will end up being fine even if it takes months? Years. Whatever.” I begged Dr. Brandt to get real with me one last time.

I could smell my own breath at this point—it stank of vending machine coffee and Fritos.

“All of our tests show less than 1 percent.”

What is less than one? I asked myself. Zero. What is zero? Nothing. How had my husband—my everything—turned into nothing?

What was less than 1 percent of Decker? Was it a man I would love? Was it a man who would want to be alive? That’s when it hit me: everything that made Decker Decker was gone.

Miracles were off the table; I had come to accept that. So I looked at it like a math problem instead, heartless as it sounds. That was the moment I became a technically minded woman. That was the moment I was finally able to say: “Okay, Doctor. Let’s call it.”

“Char? Should we go?” Brian asks again, waving at me to zone back in.

“Yeah, sorry. Let’s roll.”

As we saunter down the main road, I can’t shake seeing those two guys watching the game. At the risk of sounding crazy, maybe even a little creepy, I ask: “Did you see that guy at the bar? The one in the wheelchair?”

“The one who was in the bathroom before you?”

“Yeah, him.”

“Sure. What about him?”

“I know this is going to sound weird, but he looked like Decker, didn’t he? Same vibe and all.”

“I mean, I guess. Similar hair color.”

“What if...what if Decker could have ended up like that had I just given him more time to heal?”

“Ended up like what exactly?” Brian asks.

“You know, like, that guy. Remarkably okay and normal considering the circumstances. I mean, that dude was just out with his friend—and that friend could have been you. They were just watching baseball, sharing a bucket of beer, hanging at the bar. Total dude stuff. What if Decker could have recovered like that and I never gave him the chance to? God, I never should have signed him up for that race.”

“Hey, let’s not panic here, okay? The stroke he had could have happened while he was taking a shower or playing video games on the couch. Instead, it happened at the start of a race. That’s how these things work. It’s sad and it’s scary, but at the end of the day, it was a heart defect no one knew he had. You couldn’t have controlled what happened next.”

“Yeah, but—”

“His body wasn’t made of steel, Charlotte. Look, I’m not trying to be insensitive here, but he had an irreparable brain injury and internal bleeding. I may be in the medical field now, but even a Joe Schmoe off the street would know that’s a lot of trauma. So if you’re wondering, I’d say you made the right choice, you made the only choice. And to be honest, I’m glad it fell on someone strong enough to make it. Hell, I don’t know if I could have done the same thing then.”