As a physician, he knew better than anyone what lay ahead for him, and he refused to drag her through it. He made the decision about the divorce entirely on his own, and gave her no choice. Their divorce had been final two years before, after her return from her months in India. They tried not to talk about their marriage and divorce anymore. The subject was too painful for both of them. Somehow, with all that had happened, they had lost each other. They still loved each other and were close, but he wouldn’t allow her to be part of his life anymore. She knew that he cared about her and loved her, but he was determined to die quietly on his own. And other than her work, his seemingly generous gesture had left her completely alone and at loose ends.

She worried about him, but she knew that medically he was in good hands. He spent months at a time on his boat, and the rest of the time he lived in London, or went back to Boston for treatment at Harvard. But there was relatively little they could do to help him. The disease was slowly devouring him, but for now, he could still get around, although it was a challenge for him. It was easier for him being on the boat, with the crew around him all the time.

They had married when Hope was twenty-one years old, when she graduated from Brown. He had already been a surgeon and professor at Harvard by then, and was thirty-seven years old. They had met when Paul came to Brown to teach for a semester, during a sabbatical he had taken from Harvard. It was Hope’s junior year at Brown. Paul had fallen in love with her the first time he laid eyes on her, and their affair had been passionate and intense, until they married a year later right after graduation. And even in the two years since their divorce, she had never loved any other man. Paul Forrest was an impossible act to follow, and she was still deeply attached to him, whether they were married or not. He had been able to divorce her, but not to make her fall out of love with him. She just accepted it as a fact of their life. And even though his illness had changed him, she still saw the same brilliant man and mind within the broken body.