Sweet Romance11 min read
A Doctor, a Rain, and the Crab-Roe Noodles
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I did not plan to be at the hospital that afternoon.
"I shouldn't have come," I told myself as I pressed my face to the tall narrow glass of Room 261. "I shouldn't have come."
Inside, Liam Coelho and Fernanda Blevins were kissing like they had never stopped. I should have walked away. I should have kept the plan we made at the registry office the day he stormed in—three months, he said, and then his life would be back with me. I should have trusted my own small voice.
"Anna," he had said at the registry, wet with grief. "Fernanda is sick. She—she has leukemia. I have to go. Give me three months."
"Three months?" I had helped him smooth the collar of his shirt, had sighed an exhausted smile because I wanted him to be okay. "Three months, then you come back and we marry."
"I'll come back," he promised, eyes glassy. "I swear."
"Promise me you'll come back," I said, foolishly, because promises are the currency of small people who want certainty.
Now the promise lay between them like a shadow I could not cross. I turned to leave and bumped the hard warmth of another body.
"Hey, are you all right?" a voice asked.
"I'm fine." I hurried out, embarrassed and foolish.
He followed. "No, you're not."
"I said I'm fine," I repeated, because I had rehearsed the line and because I didn't want to be the woman who cried in a hospital corridor.
"Do you want to sit down?" The man—tall, spare in a straight white coat—reached for a tissue and extended it like an olive branch.
"I—thank you." My hands were shaking. I took the tissue. "I'm Anna."
"Francisco Lehmann," he said. "Oncology. I saw you at the door."
"I saw you too." I realized then that his eyes were kind, that his smile did not look like the tired smiles of the other doctors I had known.
"You don't look like the usual patients' relatives," he said lightly.
"I guess not. I'm... I was going to marry a man who left me at the registry this morning."
"Because of his ex?" Francisco's mouth tilted, half apology, half question.
"Her name is Fernanda." I kept my voice flat. "She left him five years ago, got on a plane, and lived how she wanted. Now she is sick and he's gone."
Francisco nodded. "I've been her doctor. She's been a patient."
"She was—" I could not finish. The word "ill" had a tenderness I didn't deserve right then.
"She has a disease we cannot always control," Francisco said. "That doesn't mean she deserves a blank check on people's lives."
"Is that what you're supposed to tell me?" I asked. "That it's not her fault?"
"I'm a doctor." He shrugged. "Sometimes I am a human being first."
He asked my name again and sat, and the corridor seemed to shrink to the span between us. We talked until the hospital lights blurred. He told me the difference between types of leukemia in simple words. I told him about crab-roe noodles—why my little shop down by the university made them with extra egg yolk.
"Bring me some one day," he said.
"I will," I promised, the shape of a new promise forming in my chest.
Later, the elevator jammed and he helped me out when I slipped. He fell too. He blackened his right forearm badly by trying to catch me. "You didn't need to dive," I cried, mortified.
"You're not a thing to break," he said, catching himself with a laugh that hid flinches. "People are not for catching."
At the clinic his arm needed a cast. At lunch he refused to eat cold noodles. I argued until he let me reheat his food. He teased me about being a puppet master of flavors for tired surgeons.
"Anna," he said, as if the word tasted new. "Why do you bring food every day?"
"Because it makes me feel like I matter when I see you not eat," I said. "And because I'm stubborn."
"That is a very attractive combination." He smiled, and I almost forgave the day.
Two weeks passed like a soft skiff on a lake. I brought him meals; he let me comb shaving foam over his face and humiliate myself by learning to shave his jaw with a trembling hand. He joked that the electric razor was our third wheel. "You're awful at this," he said the first time.
"You should be grateful I didn't cut you," I snarled playfully.
"Scandalous." He winked.
"You're ridiculous," I said, but my fingers trembled less and less when they touched his cheek.
We fell into a rhythm that did not feel like a rebound—it felt like a truce between two people who were learning warmth. I began to look forward to the clang of the elevator and to his small complaints about cold coffee.
Then the truth found me rustling on a top-floor garden where the wind tried to spin the wavy grasses into a compass. I intended to say goodbye. He had surgery in three days and the cast would come off. I wanted to say what people say before someone wakes up.
A message lit on his phone as we settled on the bench. I saw the name. Fernanda.
"Francisco," the message read, "I'm seeing the northern lights in Murmansk. This time is like the trip you and I took. Thank you for everything."
My heart stuttered. I thought the bronzed bowl in my hands had been emptied of all illusions. I thought wrong.
That night my apartment tasted like cooling oil and half-sentences.
I saw them then, later on the rooftop where the sky leaned like a bowl. Liam Coelho was there, and Fernanda Blevins came like the sun behind a cloud—sudden and burning.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Anna," Liam said. "I thought—"
"You thought what? You thought kissing her on top of a hospital with me two floors down wasn't crossing a line?"
"She's sick." His voice was a mixture of pleading and shame. "She could die."
"She could die," Fernanda said flatly, "and yet you take the highest place at the registry? You left me standing by a door five years ago, Liam. Now you come and ask for time because I'm sick? That is not romance. That is cowardice."
Francisco emerged from the shade. He looked tired and furious in the same breath. "What is going on here?"
"Francisco—" Fernanda's eyes flashed.
"Stay out of this," she snapped. "This is between them."
"This is between all of us," Francisco said. "Fernanda, did you tell him the full truth about your condition?"
"My condition is my business." She turned her face up, small and savage. "And his life is his to choose."
"Tell me what you told him," I said.
"You told him you had acute leukemia when you didn't," Liam accused. He tried to look brave and failed.
Fernanda laughed, soft and cruel. "Acute sounds scarier. People move when fear knocks."
"No." Francisco's face was an iron plate. "That's not true."
"Then tell him," I said. "Tell everyone what you told him."
It had started small—messages from anonymous numbers, her unpredictable appearances at his office, the grief that exploded him into hasty promises. It had ended at the registry that morning. I wanted the lie peeled open.
Francisco drew a breath. "I have a copy of Fernanda's full medical record," he said calmly. "I am a doctor. I cannot break confidentiality lightly. But there are times when information must be presented for truth's sake. I will show the facts."
The rooftop became a small court. Nurses, a janitor taking an evening air, a young intern—Joelle James—who had been watering the plants, drifted closer. "What are you doing?" Joelle asked.
"True things," I said.
Francisco put his phone on speaker and tapped play.
"Fernanda," the voice said, clipped and clinical. "This is Professor Lehmann. Your bone marrow tests do not show the aggressive markers of acute leukemia. You have a chronic condition, which progresses slower, with long treatment options. You do not require the kind of urgent radical therapy we discussed. You could pursue less invasive care. You are choosing to tell the world a more dire version for reasons you have not disclosed."
Fernanda's face went white as paper. "How—"
"That is a fragment of our conversations," Francisco continued. "I am not revealing confidential matters to humiliate—"
"You are exposing me." She drew herself up, fierce and small. "You betrayed me."
"Do you want to explain to Liam why you exaggerated? Do you want to explain that you encouraged him to leave his fiancé because you thought you might die—when the medical record says otherwise?" Francisco's voice did not rise. "Do you want him to know you never called him for months because you wanted to be free?"
Around us, people held their breath. Liam's face, when he saw his own messages and her recorded admissions, changed from the shaky bravado of a man trying to be a husband to the stunned splay of someone whose anchor was pulled.
"Fernanda, did you ever tell me the truth?" Liam whispered.
She flinched, as if struck. "I—" She tried to summon guilt into words and found only the thin shell of excuses. "I thought if I could make him come back, it would be... easier for him. I didn't know how else to—"
"It doesn't matter what you think you were doing for him," I said. "You lied. You used fear like a hook. You let him abandon me without letting him choose honestly."
Someone in the small crowd muttered, "That's awful." Someone else clicked a photo. A child peering from a nurse's arms gasped.
"You left us," I told Liam Coelho. "Not because she was sick, but because you wanted to answer to the easiest voice. When she got sick, you came like a tree bending to the loudest wind. You used me as a place-holder. You used my life."
"It's not like that," he said. "I loved you. I—"
"You loved the version of me that didn't ask questions," I shot back. "I was going to marry you thinking I had a partner. You used my kindness as a rehearsal stage for someone else."
He staggered, as if he had been struck. The rooftop became a chorus of soft exclamations. People shifted. Phones recorded. Joelle James covered her mouth.
Fernanda started to sob, and her performance turned inward as the faces of onlookers slid from sympathy to something colder.
"Do you want anything?" Francisco asked me quietly.
"I want them to see," I answered, voice stripped of all softness. "I don't want to watch them leave and do the same twice."
Francisco stepped forward and, with the calm of someone who knows procedures, took the printed messages from his pocket—texts, emails, photos of private flights and a ticket stub from Murmansk. He put them on a bench and read them aloud.
"Here," he said. "A photograph: Fernanda and Liam at the harbor, two months ago, smiling. Here's a receipt for a hotel he paid for last week. Here's an audio note where Fernanda says she told him about 'the big one' because she wanted him back."
The words landed like pebbles and then like stones. Liam's face crumpled. He reached for Fernanda. She flinched away.
"I thought I was doing right," Liam whispered. "I thought I could stand by her."
"You thought you could be a credit to a woman who lied to you?" I said. "You thought that when you were caught, you could ask forgiveness and come back like nothing happened?"
"No!" he cried. "Please—"
"Please what?" I asked. "Kiss me and pretend it didn't hurt? Get down on your knees? Go on a podcast and tell them you were weak?"
An intern—Tomas Ruiz—took out his phone. "Sir," he said quietly to Liam, "the word is spreading. The nurses are talking. The oncology staff are offended. You can't act like you didn't choose."
"Do something," someone in the crowd urged. "Do something. Apologize."
Liam swallowed. He stepped forward, red and small and suddenly very young. "I'm sorry," he said. "Anna, I—"
"Sorry isn't a time machine," I said. "It doesn't give me back the nights I waited. It doesn't make the marriage license vanish."
At that, Fernanda tried to pull him close. "You love me," she sobbed. "We belong together."
Francisco looked at her the way he had looked at me the first day—tired and unfailing in kindness. "Fernanda," he said, "I cared for you as a patient. I will not let someone use illness to manipulate another's life."
A nurse—Leona Said—took a step forward. "This is harassment," she said. "This is manipulation. We will report it to the hospital ethics board."
For the first time, Fernanda's eyes showed fear. "You can't do that," she cried. "I'll be ruined."
"You ruined someone already," I said. "You used your illness as a weapon. That is an abuse of trust."
A man in a suit who had been on a hospital tour stopped and said, "Publicly demonstrating the truth is one thing. But are you sure this is the way?"
"Yes," Francisco said. "We will file a formal statement. We will let them see the facts. But I wanted them to see their choices now, in front of people who know them."
Fernanda's shoulders shook. "I didn't mean—" she began, and then the voice caught.
The punishment was not a legal one. The ethics board would do that. The real punishment was social and emotional. People around us turned and whispered. Some faces hardened, and the kindness in them retreated.
"She lied," a neighbor in the garden said. "That's wrong."
"What kind of person makes life decisions for others using disease?" asked another.
Phones were out. A nurse's assistant—Karsyn Franklin—said, "Do you realize what she did? She played with a man's heart."
Liam tried to speak again, but his words came thin. He learned in that hour what it is to be seen by a crowd that knows you failed.
Fernanda's public unmasking moved through a small, precise agony. Her earlier confident posture collapsed. She first tried denial—"You can't prove that!" she yelled. Then came bargaining—"I didn't mean it like that—" and then the full surrender: wet, shuddering sobs with people watching. Her face burned with shame.
"There are people who will stand by you," someone near the entrance called. "But you can't ask people to forgive without truth."
A small group of staff circled them like a slow net. "You used your illness as leverage," Leona said gently but firmly. "We will refer this to patient relations. This is not acceptable."
"He abandoned me before," Liam mumbled. "I—"
"You had choices," I said. "You left because you were seduced by fear and drama."
The crowd murmured agreement. There were no stones thrown, only the coldness of witnesses.
Fernanda's reactions changed in sequence and I watched them like a study. At first: bright, predatory anger—"How dare you?" she spat. Then denial—"You never asked." Then incredulous fear—"Everyone is looking!" Then pleading—"Please don't—" Then rage—"You have no right—" And finally collapse into whimpers. Her makeup ran, leaving her face blotched and real.
Liam swung between collapsing and anger. He tried to pick up some dignity and failed, begging forgiveness he had not earned. People who had once smiled at him at the charity dinner moved away. Friends texted and then deleted him. The interns who used to ask him for favors looked at him like a man who had made a bad choice.
No one pushed them to their knees. No one recorded shaming speeches. The punishment was the exposure, the unraveling before people who had believed and who now felt betrayed. It was worse than being fired—it was being seen weak and selfish. It would echo in hospital corridors and in the quiet gossip of coffee rooms. That echo hurt.
Francisco took my hand when the crowd thinned. "Are you all right?" he asked.
"I will be," I said. "Because I can see that I am not alone."
"You are not." He squeezed my fingers. "You are not alone."
We walked down from the rooftop in a small, resolute silence. The hospital lights looked less cold. The world seemed clearer.
"I know I did wrong," Francisco said later as we sat in the staff lounge and ate the crab-roe noodles I had stubbornly brought. "I used my voice to help. I should have handled it differently."
"You were honest," I said. "And honest is better."
He looked at me like the ordinary miracle I had grown to expect: steady, practical, and unexpectedly warm. "Anna," he said, and sounded convinced, "I like you. I have liked you since you took strangers into your tiny shop that rainy night."
"You remember that?" I asked, surprised.
He smiled. "Of course. You gave them shelter. You gave them noodles. You gave them your umbrella. You were kind without cost."
My last memory of that night was not Fernanda's collapsing sobs or Liam's white face, but a small awkward confession over steaming bowls.
"I want to ask you to wait," Francisco said, blunt and sweet. "For a stupid cast to come off and for me to be ironed out of these stitches."
"I will wait," I said.
"Don't wait like you'd wait for someone who might return," he warned with a faint smile. "Wait like someone who trusts an arrival."
I laughed then, and it was the cleanest sound I had made in months. I leaned forward and kissed him—quick, brave, and honest.
Later, he would go into a small repair surgery for his arm. I would sit at his side like a small stubborn sentinel, passing him his fork and joking about electric razors.
When the cast came off, when the scars healed, when hospital corridors murmured with their own small life—when all this passed—I promised myself one final odd, private thing.
On the night of the first rain after everything, I would make a bowl of crab-roe noodles, bring it to the top-floor garden, and set it on the bench where the truth had been spoken. I would sit down, lift my face to the sky, and taste the salt of a bowl that was mine and another's. If the noodles tasted like ordinary life, I would know we had truly moved on.
The End
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