“How’s he doing?” I ask at the nursing station, my work bag cutting into my shoulder.

“Same,” the nurse says, shuffling papers without looking up. Then, as an afterthought, she lifts her head. “You’ve got some company today. Another patient. Temporary. Until a bed opens up.”

“Thanks for letting me know,” I say, already looking down the hall. The door to his room—usually open—is now closed. “Everything okay?”

“Yes. Of course,” she says, then hesitates. “But the other patient is withdrawing…” Her voice trails off and her gaze drifts back to her paperwork, as if the silence itself fills in the rest.

“I see.”

Inside the room, the curtain divider is pulled shut. My husband lies propped in the bed, asleep. Tape holds a tube in place. The monitor behind him drums its steady, indifferent rhythm. He looks… almost peaceful. I take my usual seat in the brown, cushioned armchair and reach for his hand.

The door swings open and a different nurse enters. I catch her name—April—on the dry-erase board, written in big looping cursive. She looks just out of school, but her smile brightens the room. She finishes checking my husband’s IV and turns to me. “So—how did you two meet?”

I open my mouth, then stop when my husband stirs, as if he might wake and answer for me. I squeeze his hand. Your favorite question, honey. Wake up.

Nothing.

It was his game. Whenever someone asked, “So how did you two meet?” he’d wink at me, eyes suddenly bright, lean in—then you never knew what was going to come out.

One time he said, “It’s quite funny, actually, but I met my wife at a Chick-fil-A.”

“Really?” someone answered.

“Well, we didn’t meet inside the restaurant,” he said, as if it were obvious. “We met in the drive-thru. I was ordering through the speaker, and wham—the car in front backs right into my bumper.”

People loved him for it. They laughed. They relaxed. Wives and husbands looked at each other with renewed admiration, as if our story were proof of what’s possible.

He ended with “Love at first crash,” but it never stopped there. I had to play along, or I wouldn’t be the fun-loving wife with the charming husband—I’d be the wife making it weird. The wife with something to hide.

“Oh, it wasn’t that dramatic,” I would say, smiling just enough. “I’d changed my mind and was trying to leave. I wasn’t paying attention. Not at first, anyway.”

Sometimes I’d add, “To be honest, I’m pretty sure he ran into me,” and the other wives would nod approvingly.

Once he said we met at a strip club.

“I wasn’t a dancer,” I cut in, because of course that matters to somebody. “I was behind the bar. A friend got me the job. I was… twenty-two. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

I can laugh about it now. Mostly.

But back then, the longer he performed, the more I sometimes felt like I was underwater—kicking toward the surface, needing air, and finding it just out of reach.

Because as ridiculous as his stories were, they came out easier than the real one.

We met at the Minneapolis Center for Alcohol and Drug Addiction. Rehab. He was the first person who looked at me and didn’t see all my past mistakes. Suddenly, I was laughing when I hadn’t laughed in months. Two strangers learning how to be human again without our old tricks.

In rehab they tell you not to date for a year. They say it with the calm optimism of people who believe rules can stop gravity. We didn’t break any rules the obvious way. We broke them the way planets do—drifting close enough until our lives became a synchronous orbit.

My thoughts are interrupted by a groan on the other side of the curtain.

A woman calls out, voice tight. “Nurse? Can we please see the doctor? He’s really uncomfortable.”

“Excuse me,” April says, and disappears to the other side.

I can’t help overhearing.

“It’s too soon for pain medication,” April says softly, “not until the tox screen comes back. Has he withdrawn before—”

“We already told you,” the woman says, too quickly. “He fell and injured his back.”

A man groans again. “It just… hurts.”

“Please—can you check with the doctor?” the woman says, softening her voice.

I know that tone. The one that tries to outrun judgment. The one that thinks if you say the right story, you can become the right kind of person. I can hear her trying to make the words sound normal. Respectable. Safe.

April returns a moment later and smooths her expression into a smile. She checks my husband’s monitor, then looks at me again.

“Sorry,” she says quietly. “You were about to tell me. How did you two meet?”

I look at my husband. He doesn’t wake. His hand rests in mine, heavy and warm.

But suddenly I understand what I didn’t, back when I felt like I was drowning in his stories.

He wasn’t running from our beginning. He was protecting it—protecting me—from the easy, lazy way people decide who you are without ever knowing you.

Heat rushes to my face. My eyes sting. I hear my voice break. “It’s kind of funny,” I say, pausing to look at him. “But we met at a Chick-fil-A drive-thru.”

April laughs. “No way.”

“Actually,” I add, and my voice drops, “we met in a place like this. Plastic chairs. Bad coffee. Two people trying to learn how to live again.”

The monitor keeps its steady rhythm.

Then—so small I might have imagined it—my husband’s fingers tighten around mine.

I smile at him the way I used to in crowded restaurants. “Love at first crash,” I whisper.

This time, I’m not underwater.

For now, that was enough.