“Five minutes. Then you can sleep.”
I finished telling the story.
The doctor said nothing for a moment.
Then he stood up and unlocked the door.
Robert came in immediately, looking worried.
“What happened?”
The doctor looked at him.
“Your wife told me you have forced her, for fifty-four years, to let you examine her body every night.”
Robert’s face changed instantly.
“Margaret…”
I started laughing.
“Relax. I told him everything.”
Robert sat beside me.
The doctor pulled up one of my examination images again.
“Actually, you missed something this time,” he said.
Robert and I both looked at him.
The doctor pointed to my right foot.
Apparently, I had suffered a small injury several days earlier and hadn’t noticed it at all.
Robert hadn’t seen it either because it was between my toes.
Fortunately, it wasn’t serious.
But the doctor said,
“If this had gone unnoticed for a few more weeks, it could have become a real problem.”
Robert turned toward me.
I knew that look.
It was the same look he had given me 54 years ago.
“Don’t start,” I said.
“From now on, I’m checking between your toes too.”
“Robert.”
“The doctor just said—”
The doctor couldn’t help laughing.
Neither could I.
Then I looked at Robert’s hands.
They had grown old.
His fingers were no longer as steady as they once were.
And suddenly, I realized something I had never really thought about in 54 years.
People often say love is telling someone “I love you” every day.
Robert had never been especially good at that.
His “I love you” looked different.
Sometimes it looked like a bright bathroom light.
A small mirror.
The words, “Show me your feet.”
And a man who had spent 54 years searching every night for the pain I could not feel myself.
I took his hand.
“You really have forced me for half my life.”
He looked at me.
“I know.”
“And do you know the worst part?”
“What?”
I smiled.
“Now I’m going to start forcing you.”
“To do what?”
“Get new glasses. You missed something today.”
At 82 years old, I walked out of that hospital holding his hand.
And only then did I fully understand that sometimes the strangest form of care can look completely different from the outside.
For 54 years, he wasn’t trying to control my life. He was simply searching, every single night, for the danger my own body could no longer warn me about. 
