didn’t save your life. You saved her life.”
“My supervisor saved her life,” said Yao. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
“And now you loooooove her,” said Delilah, putting her bra back on.
“Like a sister,” said Yao.
“Yeah right,” said Delilah.
“Like a cousin.”
Delilah snorted.
He did care very deeply for Masha. Was that so strange? To love your boss? Surely not so strange when you lived and worked together, and when your boss looked like Masha. She was interesting and stimulating. He found her exotic accent as attractive as her body. He would admit he had a significant crush on her. Perhaps his crush was strange and indicated some flaw in his personality or dysfunctional consequence of his childhood, even though it was just the ordinary, happy childhood of a shy, earnest boy who could get a little too intense about things but mostly slipped under the radar. His parents were softly spoken, humble people who never pushed him. Yao’s parents believed in keeping expectations low to avoid disappointment. His father said that out loud once, without irony: “Expect to fail, Yao, then you will never be disappointed.” That’s why Yao found Masha’s egotism so refreshing. She was bigger than life. Self-deprecation was something she had never practiced and did not understand in other people.
And Masha had saved his life.
After her heart attack, she had written letters to both Finn and Yao, thanking them and talking about how her “near-death experience” had changed her forever. She said that while she floated above them, she had seen the tiny red birthmark on Yao’s scalp. She had described it perfectly: strawberry shaped.
Finn never answered Masha’s letter. “She’s a nutter. She didn’t need to float above our bloody heads to see your birthmark. She probably saw it when she was sitting at her desk, before she collapsed.”
But Yao was intrigued by her near-death experience. He emailed her, and over the years they kept up a sporadic correspondence. She told him that after she recovered from her heart surgery, she’d given up her “highly successful” (her words) corporate career and cashed in her company shares to buy a famous historic house in the countryside. She was going to put in a swimming pool and restore the house. Her initial plan had been to start an exclusive bed-and-breakfast, but as her interest in health had developed, she changed her mind.
She wrote, Yao, I have transformed my body, my mind, my soul, and I want to do the same for others.
There was an element of grandiosity to her emails he found amusing and endearing, but really she was not especially important to him. Just a grateful ex-patient with a funny turn of phrase.
And then, just after his twenty-fifth birthday, all his dominos toppled: bam, bam, bam. First, his parents announced they were divorcing. They sold the family home and moved into separate apartments. It was confusing and distressing. Then, in the midst of all that drama, his fiancée, Bernadette, broke off their engagement. It came without warning. He thought they were deeply in love. The reception and honeymoon were booked. How was it possible? It felt like the foundations of his life were collapsing beneath his feet. A breakup wasn’t a tragedy and yet, to his shame, it felt cataclysmic.
His car got stolen.
He began to suffer from stress-related dermatitis.
Finn moved away and the ambulance service transferred Yao to a regional area where he knew no one, where the call-outs mostly involved violence and drugs. One night a man held a knife to his throat and said, “If you don’t save her, I’ll slit your throat.” The woman was already dead. When the police came, the man lunged at them with the knife and he was shot. Yao ended up saving his life.
He went back to work. Then two days later he woke up just a few minutes before his alarm, as usual, but the moment it went off something catastrophic happened to his brain. He felt it implode. It felt physical. He thought it was a bleed on the brain. He ended up in a psychiatric ward.
“It sounds like you’ve been under a lot of pressure,” said a doctor with dark shadows under his eyes.
“Nobody died,” said Yao.
“But it feels like they did, doesn’t it?” said the doctor.
That was exactly how it felt: like death after death after death. Finn was gone. His fiancée was gone. His family home was gone. Even his car was gone.
“We used to call this a nervous breakdown,” said the doctor. “Now