Julian’s tuition, which his parents had been quietly helping cover, became impossible overnight.
“I think I have to withdraw,” he told me one night in my cramped apartment, sitting on the edge of my bed with his head in his hands. “I can’t ask them for another dollar. There isn’t another dollar.”
I couldn’t stand the look on his face. I really couldn’t.
So I made the hardest decision I’d ever made in my twenty-four years on this earth. I withdrew from Calder myself, at the end of that semester, and told him one doctor in the family would be enough for now.
“Simone, no,” he said, when I told him. “This is your dream too.”
“It’s not going anywhere,” I said, and I believed that, the way you believe things when you’re twenty-four and in love and haven’t yet learned what waiting actually costs a person. “Yours has a shorter runway right now. Mine can wait.”
I started working two jobs within a month — waiting tables at a steakhouse off Route 9 during the day, and doing medical billing at a family practice three evenings a week, using the little bit of coursework I already had. Some days I barely slept. Some nights my feet hurt so bad I sat on the bathroom floor and cried where nobody could hear me over the shower running.
Every time Julian passed an exam, I told myself it was worth it.
“Once I’m through this,” he used to say, holding my face in both his hands, “we build everything we gave up. Both of us. I promise you that.”
I believed him with my whole chest.
We got married the following year, in a small church in my mother’s hometown of Willow Creek, Georgia, with maybe forty people and a reception in the fellowship hall with my aunties fighting over who made the better mac and cheese. I was twenty-five. Julian was twenty-six. My father walked me down the aisle in a suit two sizes too big that he’d insisted still fit him fine.
For the next several years, I kept working while Julian moved through the grinding middle of medical school — the clinical rotations, the overnight call shifts, the exams that seemed to multiply instead of end. I picked up a third part-time job for a stretch when our car needed a new transmission. I learned to stretch a paycheck the way my grandmother used to stretch a pot of greens to feed twelve people.
I also learned, somewhere in there, not to ask too many questions about his mother.
Constance Voss had been sick for years by then, in a way the family talked around instead of through. “Not herself lately.” “Having a rough patch.” I met her twice before she passed, the second time near the end, when her hands wouldn’t stay still and she called me by Julian’s cousin’s name and nobody in the room corrected her. Julian never explained what exactly was wrong with her, only that it ran in families and that it had taken his grandfather too, young, the same slow and cruel way. I didn’t push. Grief has its own doors, and some of them aren’t yours to open.
Constance died the winter of Julian’s third year. He missed one week of rotations for the funeral and was back on the wards the following Monday, hollow-eyed, saying almost nothing about it, throwing himself into work like a man trying to outrun something.
I thought that was grief. I didn’t yet understand it was also fear.
By his fourth year, Julian had changed in small ways I noticed and explained away one at a time.
He started canceling our Friday date nights more often, always with a reasonable excuse — an extra shift, a study group, a lecture he couldn’t miss. He got quieter on the phone whenever it rang from a number I didn’t recognize, stepping into the hallway to take it. Once, going through our joint bank statement to pay bills, I found a withdrawal for six hundred dollars to a clinic two hours away in Asheborough, a name I didn’t recognize and he brushed off as “just some testing for a research thing at school.”
