“Because you were already gone!” she suddenly snapped, a flash of her old spirit piercing through her exhaustion. “You weren’t there, Arjun! You were physically in the house, but your mind was always somewhere else. Every time I looked at you, I saw a man who was drowning in regret for marrying a woman who couldn’t even give him a family. If I had told you I had cancer, you would have stayed out of obligation, out of pity. Do you think I wanted that? Do you think I wanted my husband to stay with me just because he felt guilty?”
Her words hit me like physical blows. Every late-night shift I took, every conversation I cut short, every time I chose a spreadsheet over looking my wife in the eye—it all flashed before me. She hadn’t stayed silent out of spite. She had stayed silent to protect whatever dignity she had left.
“When you asked for the divorce that night in April,” Maya whispered, her anger draining away as quickly as it had come, leaving her looking smaller than before, “it felt like a mercy. I thought, ‘Good. He can leave now. He can go be happy, and he won’t have to watch me die.’”
“Don’t say that!” I pleaded, dropping to my knees right there on the cold linoleum floor, gripping both of her hands now. “Don’t talk about dying. They can treat this. Semmelweis is one of the best clinics in Europe. What’s the plan? What do the doctors say?”
Maya looked away, her silence sending a chill straight down my spine.
A Lonely Battle
“Maya, what is the treatment plan?” I demanded, desperation clawing at my throat.
“I’ve already completed two rounds of aggressive chemotherapy,” she said, gesturing vaguely to her short hair. “That’s why I look like this. The doctors hoped it would put the cancer into remission, but…” She swallowed hard. “The latest scans show it’s not responding the way they wanted. My body is rejecting the standard treatments.”
“There has to be something else. A bone marrow transplant? A donor?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “A stem cell transplant is my only option left. But finding a matching donor takes time, Arjun. Time I don’t exactly have. And even if they find one, the procedure is incredibly expensive. The insurance only covers a fraction of it because of a clause regarding pre-existing symptoms.”
I stared at her, horrified. She was sitting here, fighting for her life, worrying about money, completely alone.
“Where is your family? Where is your mother?” I asked.
“My mother is sixty-eight and living on a tiny pension back home,” Maya said, her voice trembling. “If I tell her, the shock will kill her before the cancer kills me. I told her I moved to Budapest for a high-paying corporate job and that I’m just too busy to call often. I send her photos from a year ago so she thinks I’m fine.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The woman I loved—and God help me, I realized in that exact moment that I still loved her fiercely—had engineered a massive web of lies just to suffer in absolute isolation.
“I’m here now,” I said fiercely, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. “I don’t care about the divorce papers. I don’t care about the past. I am not leaving you alone in this hallway, Maya. I will find the money. I will talk to the doctors. We will fight this together.”
For a split second, a glimmer of hope appeared in her dull eyes. But it was quickly replaced by a profound, heartbreaking exhaustion.
“Arjun, don’t do this to yourself. You don’t owe me anything anymore.”
“I owe you my life,” I said, my voice breaking. “I threw away five years of our marriage because I was a coward who couldn’t handle grief. Please, Maya. Let me be a man for once in my life. Let me stay.”
Before she could answer, a stern-looking doctor in a white lab coat emerged from a nearby consultation room. He held a thick medical chart in his hands, his face grim. He looked at Maya, then noticed me kneeling beside her.
“Mrs. Kovács?” the doctor called out, using her maiden name. He paused, looking at me. “Are you a relative?”
“I’m her husband,” I stood up immediately, correcting him without a second thought. “What’s happening, Doctor?”
The doctor sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He didn’t bother correcting me about our marital status. He looked down at the chart, then back up at us, his eyes filled with a heavy, professional solemnity.
“I’m glad you’re here, sir. We just got the results of the emergency blood panel we ran this morning, as well as the updated donor registry sweep.”
