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It’s a matter of trust. It always has been, in a way.
The way her hands shook the first time she picked up a blade after The Incident. They had never trembled that way before, and they haven’t since.
This was after everything, you understand. After she watched the funeral from twenty graves away. After the reporters staked out her apartment. After the newspapers plastered her face all over the newspapers in criminal black and white. After she saw her mother cry over a burnt pot roast (or so she said) and her father just stared across the dinner table, his eyes empty. After the investigation cleared her name and everyone in the hospital breathed a sigh of relief. After her fellow surgeons acknowledged her presence again, like she had suddenly been cured of Ebola.
That day, the first time after, she scrubbed her nails, the webs between her fingers, the palms of her hands, her wrists, her forearms, all the way to her elbows, like wearing debutante gloves made of orange lather. She scrubbed until it stung, until her skin shone red like a beacon. And she almost felt happy. She had been handed back the keys to the kingdom. All she had to do was turn the knob and go inside.
But when that nurse handed her the scalpel and she looked down at the patient—a boy, nothing more than a boy, with soft, dark skin like chocolate—it was as if a tuning fork went off in the pit of her stomach and she shook. She stared at the boy’s face, at his parted lips and the white teeth peeking out, at the gentle rise and fall of his chest, and she didn’t notice when the scalpel fell to the floor. She didn’t even hear the nurse calling her name when she turned around and left the operating room.
It’s a matter of trust.
And he trusts her. Oh, all the other ones did, to varying degrees. But it’s different with him, because she’s the only one. There are seven billion people in the world, and he only trusts her. It should make her feel better. Less useless. Less guilty. But it doesn’t.
She wonders if this has always been true. Did he trust The Woman too? She almost asks one chilly spring morning, while they’re sitting at the breakfast table, quietly sipping tea. She, reading the Times in a wool cardigan. He, with his striped-stockinged feet on the table, digging through a case file for the umpteenth time. She almost asks, but she sees the set of his sharp jaw and the shadows that pass over his blue eyes like clouds above a lake, and she bites her tongue.
He trusts her. For now, it might even make up for the fact that she doesn’t trust herself. For now, it’s enough.