Trap

I told you, you shouldn’t work so much.

But you didn’t listen so now I am looking at you with a pane of glass between us. You lie there so still, with the stitches on your forehead still. You are in a white painted metal box, and I stand here on the other side willing you to get up and cheat the Grim Reaper.

You don’t know how much I long for you to be alive again, if only because I am pregnant and I have never felt more alone in my entire life. It doesn’t matter about the money. I can always work to make a living for myself. But you, losing you—just the thought of it is enough to make me want to go mad.

I am due to give birth in two months. The sonogram said it will be a boy. I want to call him Edward, after my great uncle. You didn’t get the chance to see it, the sonogram, and didn’t get to see my shortlist of names for the baby.

There were a lot of things I didn’t get to share with you. I cry when I think about how I should have insisted, demanded that you spend more time with me. But it’s been so hard to reach you as you buried yourself more and more in your work.

I wondered. Did you know about my affair with your boss? Did you know that the baby in my womb is not yours? That I contrived to sleep with you that one last time so that you would not suspect anything?

I wonder. Were the assignments that kept piling up in your desk part of a ploy to keep me from you? Did my lover want us to separate and get an annulment so he can have me to himself?

I have no answers and as I look back on our life together this last year, I am only riddled with more questions.

You did not sleep the night before you drove to your death. You were working late, as usual and you were on your way to a provincial assignment when you fell asleep at the wheel and drove straight into a ravine.

I wonder. Were you working yourself to death? Did you do it deliberately, not sleep knowing you were driving a long distance the following day?

My lover called yesterday to call the whole thing off between us. I wonder. Did he get what he wanted finally? To trespass on your property (me) and destroy you utterly? Was I a part of a plot against you? What was it that you did that would be so horrible it would merit carefully planned vengeance?

I was looking through your things the other day and I saw pictures of your boss and you at the beach, in different restaurants and cultural places looking like you are having the times of your lives. I wonder, is he the ex you only talked about in vague terms?