She asks if I can read lips. I nod. She starts to talk. ‘When I was twelve, I broke my leg in two places. Bike accident.’ Her mouth moves in the most exaggerated, grotesque way. ‘Anyway, I had to wear a cast that went from my foot all the way up to my thigh.’ She stops, draws a line across her thigh in case I have trouble understanding. I don’t, but I appreciate the attempt. And the thigh.

She continues. ‘I couldn’t walk at all for six weeks. At school, I had to use a wheelchair, because the cast was too heavy for crutches.’

I smile, half imagining little Petra with a big cast. Half imagining where this sad story is heading.

‘I’m not saying I know what it’s like to live in a wheelchair, or to have any permanent disability. I just always feel like… well, it feels like I’ve had a small taste of what it would be like, you know?’

I nod.

She smiles with relief, afraid her story might have offended me. I type:

You are very sensitive.

She shrugs. Beams at the compliment. We have another drink.

I tell her a story that has nothing to do with being deaf. I tell her about my childhood pet, a frog named Sherman. He was a bullfrog who sat on the biggest rock in the pond and hogged all the flies. I never tried to catch Sherman; I would just watch him, and sometimes he watched me, too. We liked to sit together, and I started calling him my pet.

‘What happened to him?’ Petra asks. I shrug.

One day the rock was empty. Never saw him again.

Petra says this is sad. I tell her it isn’t. Sad would’ve been finding his dead body and being forced to bury him. I never had to do that. I just imagined he went to a bigger pond with more flies.

She likes this and tells me so.

I do not tell her everything about Sherman. For instance, he had a long tongue that darted around so fast I could hardly see it, but I always wanted to grab it. I used to sit by the pond and wonder how bad of a thought that was. How terrible was it to try and grab a frog’s tongue? And would it hurt him? If he died, would it be murder? I never tried to grab his tongue and probably couldn’t have anyway, but I thought about it. And that made me feel like I wasn’t a good friend to Sherman.

Read the first chapter of 2019’s most gripping thriller, My Lovely Wife