...I ran into the dark entryway as rain fell again. The sudden downpour made me shiver. I saw people rolling luggage to an elevator, their holiday cheer squeezing my heart. I looked to the right and found medical help right away. The front desk staff member called a nurse, who smiled when she came to me. She took me downstairs to the bowels of the hospital. This felt extra creepy. Tourists got the nice, bright upstairs rooms and patients took stairs to…the basement?

The nurse led me to a waiting room. In my terror, I’d expected dungeon walls adorned with chalk-marked slashes indicating the length of time inmates spent here. I heard no moaning and detected no odor of mold. It looked like a hospital. I saw in the waiting room, with its framed art posters depicting the recent Dali exhibit, a disturbing image of a red-eyed old woman from the Photographers Without Borders photograph exhibit and a gaudy Moulin Rouge poster. The nurse soon returned with a doctor.

Un docteur, then another one came and spoke to me, but none had the news I wanted. I sat in the waiting room, my head swimming in its own briny sea. Finally a fourth doctor arrived and provided some answers.

“Your husband is fine,” were his first words. “He broke three ribs and his left hand. The wounds to his penis are the most severe.”

“His…penis?”

I didn’t realize I’d screamed the words. I thought the echo was just in my rattled brain.

The doctor bit his lip. “Did no one tell you?”

I shook my head. “How…how was his penis injured?”

The doctor glanced away, then back at me again. He grimaced, releasing a sigh.

“He was receiving fellatio and the…uh…gentleman who was…ah…facilitating this…bit down on him at the point of impact.”

I went cold. Ice cold. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“My husband was with another…man?”

The doctor nodded.

“Is he dead, I hope?”

The doctor gave me a wry look. “No. He is injured, too.”

“Who is he?”

“This I cannot tell you since you are the…uh…husband…and he is a stranger to you. We have…um…the…uh…confidentiality of the patient to…ah…protect.”

“Auguste was screwing around on me?”

The doctor didn’t respond. He waited a few beats. “I’ll…uh…let you know when you can see him.”

Did I even want to see him?

I felt the doctor’s friendly pat on my arm before he left the room. Nobody approached me mentioning health insurance—it was the first thing they did in American hospitals—so I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. Should I call Auguste’s family? No…his parents, who lived in Provence, had been unhappy when we got married, yet his mother emailed me constantly. She didn’t want a gay son, but liked his gay husband. Now that I thought about it, I realized she forwarded jokes and chain letters about angels that threatened bad luck. Maybe this had happened because I hadn’t forwarded a single one of her emails to my ten friends within five minutes of opening one of her messages.

I stared at the photograph of the scrawny old lady on the wall in front of me. How would she react to her husband cheating? I leaned back in my seat, my head resting against the wall. It was too heavy on my shoulders, thoughts tumbling, weighing on my soul. I drew a breath. I could detect the faint scent of roses. From where? Yellow roses?

Betrayal.

I kept picturing Auguste laughing as he drove in the rain. Had he begged his passenger for head? Had it come as a surprise? Had he fought him off? Is that why they crashed?

Numbness settled within me. I didn’t want to be in the waiting room. I didn’t want to be in my body.

I didn’t want to be in Paris.