The dim glow of the hospital corridor stretched before Edith as she clutched the paper bag of homemade food tighter in her hands. The antiseptic smell and distant murmur of voices brought back memories she’d rather forget – memories of sitting by her mother’s bedside in places like this years ago.
“Excuse me, could you tell me where to find ward two-seventeen?” she asked the nurse at the station, who barely glanced up from her magazine before directing her with a tired wave.
At the door, Edith hesitated before knocking softly and entering. Four beds occupied the room, but her eyes found him immediately. William lay by the window, his face pale against the blue hospital gown, the feeble sunlight catching the grey streaks in his hair that hadn’t been there when they’d last met properly. A vase of wilted roses sat on the bedside table.
“Will?” she whispered as she approached.
His eyes fluttered open, confusion giving way to recognition. “Edie? How did you”
“Margaret from the post office told me. I hadn’t seen you in weeks, asked after you…” She set the bag down carefully, noticing how the once robust man had shrunk in the stark white sheets.
The story came out between measured breaths – the chest pains while gardening, the small but frightening heart attack, the doctor’s warnings about stress. All delivered with that same quiet stoicism she remembered from their youth.
“Brought you some proper food,” she said, unpacking jars of stewed apples and pickled onions from the bag. “None of that hospital gruel.”
His smile, when it came, was like seeing sunlight break through clouds. “Always thinking of others, aren’t you?” His hand brushed hers as he took the offered flask of tea, and for a moment they were twenty again, sitting on the banks of the Thames sharing fish and chips from newspaper.
The years between them hung unspoken until Edith found the courage. “And Pamela? Has she…”
The way his face closed told her everything. They’d divorced three months prior, after eight years of marriage. Pamela had found someone else, wanted “a fresh start”. The flat in Croydon was hers now; William had moved back in with his elderly mother in her cramped Peckham bedsit.
Edith listened, remembering their wedding photos she’d glimpsed in the newspaper years ago – Pamela radiant in white, William beaming with pride. Now here he lay, abandoned when illness struck, just as her own husband Geoffrey had left her when their daughter was barely walking.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted out suddenly. “For how things ended with us. I was such a fool back then.”
William studied her face as if seeing it anew. “Edie, that was half a lifetime ago. We were just kids.”
But she remembered – the way she’d thrown away their future for Geoffrey’s flashy promises, the sports car and empty vows that disappeared along with him five years later. While William had built a life, loved and lost, she’d been left raising little Abigail alone in that damp flat above the chippy.
Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a nurse with medications. “Relative?” the woman asked briskly, and William’s quiet “Yes” sent an unexpected warmth through Edith’s chest.
Later, as she prepared to leave, the door swung open to reveal Pamela – all blonde highlights and expensive perfume, carrying flowers that probably cost more than Edith’s weekly pension. The tension was immediate, like storm clouds gathering.
“Who are you?” Pamela’s perfectly shaped eyebrows arched in suspicion.
William’s introduction – “This is Edith, we’ve known each other years” – did nothing to soften the glare.
“Oh, the one who broke your heart before me?” Pamela’s laugh was sharp as broken glass. “Come to try your luck again now he’s vulnerable?”
Edith felt her cheeks burn, but held her ground. “I came because no one should face illness alone. Unlike some, I don’t abandon people when they need me.”
The argument escalated until William’s paling complexion forced them to stop. As the nurse shooed them out, Edith caught Pamela by the lifts.
“Look,” the younger woman said, her designer handbag clutched like armor, “I know what you think of me. But people change. I wanted… more.”
Edith studied the face that had once smiled from William’s wedding photos. “And did you find it?”
Pamela hesitated just a fraction too long before nodding.
On the bus ride home through the drizzly London streets, Edith replayed the question Pamela had flung at her: “Who are you to decide anything about William’s life?”
Who indeed? Just the woman who’d loved and left him decades ago. The woman who’d made the wrong choice and lived to regret it. The woman who couldn’t walk past suffering, not when it wore the face of someone she’d once known better than herself.
As the bus passed over Waterloo Bridge, the Thames swirling dark below, Edith realized something – perhaps time didn’t just steal things away. Perhaps, sometimes, it gave second chances too.
