The Road Captain's Other Woman

I'm a paramedic. I've seen everything that can happen to a body. I did not see my husband in the back of his own pickup with a woman I'd saved from a car wreck that spring. I left the club, the town, and the marriage in one night. Six years in a trauma centre later, my mother has a stroke, and the emergency contact on her file is still him. He waits in the cafeteria with coffee I don't want. He brings me letters I don't open. He sells his life to the club and then sells the club out of his life. He goes to therapy. He gets sober in year four and stays that way. When he finally kneels in the parking garage, I make him say the whole thing out loud, top to bottom, and he does.