“Your husband is okay,” she said, and she turned as the other woman reappeared with a bottle of water. The doctor unscrewed it and handed it to me. As I took a sip, I suddenly had the feeling that someone had said those same words to me before in the past half hour, but it hadn’t actually registered. She knelt down in front of me, and I suddenly felt silly, like I was creating a scene, another patient for them to take care of. “He lost consciousness at the swim meet, and we’ve determined that it was due to dehydration. He’s okay.”

“But last time…” I said again.

She shook her head. “I can only imagine,” she said, her hand still on my arm. “But this is nothing like last time. Here, let’s go in to see him. I think that’ll make you feel a lot better.”

She stepped back and allowed me to walk into the hospital room. It was small and cramped, and there was a curtain drawn in the middle of the room that hid a patient on the other side. Keith was looking up at the ceiling as I walked in, and he turned toward me when he heard the sound at the door. We locked eyes, and I knew instantly that what the doctor had said was both true and untrue.

He would be fine, but he was not okay.

I walked closer to the bed and swallowed, struggling to keep the tears in check. He looked so small, lying there in the hospital bed, barely filling it up. I hadn’t noticed that he’d lost weight, but here, in this sterile, white space against the backdrop of equipment that kept track of his every breath, he seemed to get swallowed up, and I could tell that he’d dropped at least ten pounds.

I took his hand, and he looked up at me, the sadness in his eyes making my heart break.

“Are you okay?” I asked, and I leaned forward. He didn’t speak. I could hear snoring from the other side of the curtain, and I leaned closer. “Keith?”

He opened his mouth, and then his face crumpled.

It took me a moment to react, because it wasn’t something I’d ever seen before. Not once. At most, I’d seen a tear roll down his cheek and settle in the stubble of his beard. At his grandfather’s funeral a few years back, he’d held his head in his hands for a long time and stared stoically at the floor while others sobbed around him.

“I’m not a crier,” he’d said during one of our early dates, over drinks. “I guess it’s just not how I process things.”

“Did you cry as a baby?”

“Yes, Paula. I cried as a baby. I’m not a psychopath.”