Twenty-two months

My name is Diane Halvorsen. I’m fifty-nine years old and I live in the same brick ranch in Warrenville, Illinois that I’ve lived in since 1997.

In October of 2023, my husband Roy was diagnosed with stage III colorectal cancer.

I want to describe what the next twenty-two months actually looked like, because people hear “she took care of him” and picture something gentle. Soup. Hand-holding. A soft-focus montage.

Here is what it looked like.

I worked the eleven-to-seven shift at a distribution center off Route 59, scanning freight. My shift ended at seven a.m. Roy’s infusions were at eight. Mercy Regional was nineteen minutes from the warehouse if I hit the lights right. I would change out of my work polo in the parking garage, in the car, because there wasn’t time to go home.

I sat with him for four to six hours. Then I drove him home, got him settled, slept from about three in the afternoon until nine at night, and went back to work.

I did that, in some version, for almost two years.

I learned to flush his port. I learned that the anti-nausea pills the hospital pushed didn’t work for him at three in the morning but the cheap generic ones did. I learned how to change sheets with a man still in the bed. I learned to call his mother, Marlene, every Sunday and tell her he was “doing all right, just tired,” because the truth would have put her in the hospital next.

I lost eleven pounds and gained twenty-four back on gas station food. I stopped coloring my hair somewhere in month nine.

In August of this year, his oncologist said the words no evidence of disease.

I cried in the parking lot for about ninety seconds and then I went and got him a milkshake because that was what he wanted.

Thursday

Four days later, Roy sat down at my kitchen table and told me he was leaving.

He didn’t ease into it. He said he’d been given a second chance and he “deserved to actually live now.” When I asked what that meant, he looked me over — the sweatpants, the gray coming in, the face of a woman who had slept in a chair for two years — and he said he wasn’t going to spend his second chance with someone who smelled like a hospital.

Her name was Sloane Petrie. She was thirty-one. She drove patients to and from appointments through the cancer center’s volunteer transport program.

I had signed him up for that program. I had filled out the form myself, in the intake office, in November of 2023, because I couldn’t always get him there on my shift schedule.

He had been seeing her since roughly the spring.

The lake house

I stayed calm through the affair. I stayed calm through the sweatpants comment. What broke something loose in me was what he said next.

He started talking about a lake house.

My father, Wendell, bought forty feet of frontage on Lake Petenwell in Wisconsin in 1974 and built a two-bedroom cottage on it with his own hands. He left it to me in 2011. It has never been in Roy’s name. It has never been marital property. He knows this — he sat in the lawyer’s office when the deed was transferred.

And he sat at my table, four days after I finished carrying him through cancer, and described the dock he wanted to put in.

He said it like it was already his. He said Sloane liked the water.

That was the moment I stopped being sad and started being clear.

“You were always reasonable”

I told Roy I wouldn’t fight him. I told him I didn’t want a courtroom. I suggested we handle it cleanly, in front of family, so nobody could later claim they’d been lied to.

Sunday. My house. His mother Marlene, his brother Dale and Dale’s wife, my daughter Renata and her husband, and Sloane if he wanted her there.

He was so relieved he actually hugged me. He said, “See, this is why I always said you were reasonable.”

He came Sunday with a folder. He’d had a draft separation agreement typed up. Somewhere in it was a line about “shared recreational property.”

Nine people at my dining room table. Pot roast, because I wasn’t going to let Marlene drive forty minutes for nothing.

And then the doorbell rang.

My guest

The woman who walked into my dining room was in her mid-forties, in a blazer, carrying a slim leather folder of her own. Roy set down his fork.

Her name is Paula Ostrand. She is a claims investigator, and for the past five months she had been reviewing a set of reimbursement submissions filed under Roy’s name through the cancer center’s patient assistance and travel-support program.

Here is the part Roy did not know I knew.

During treatment, patients at Mercy could apply for mileage reimbursement and lodging stipends — money set aside by a small foundation attached to the hospital for people traveling to appointments. It’s meant for people who can’t afford to get there. I applied for it in early 2024, when we were bleeding money and I was down to one working car.

We were approved for a modest amount. That money came in for about six months.

Then, starting in June of 2024, the claims got bigger. Overnight lodging in Lake Geneva. Mileage that didn’t match any route to any hospital in Illinois. Meal per diems on days he had no appointment at all.

Roy had kept filing. He’d kept filing after we stopped needing it, and he’d been filing for two people.

He’d been using a charity fund for cancer patients to pay for weekends with Sloane.

I didn’t find this out through any cleverness. I found it in July, when a letter came to my house — my address is still on the account — flagging an inconsistency and requesting documentation. Roy had been intercepting the mail. He missed one.

I sat with that letter for six days. I was still, at that point, planning to be married to this man.

Then he told me I smelled like a hospital.

So on Monday morning, I called the number on the letter and I gave Paula Ostrand every single thing she asked for. Bank records. Appointment calendars. My own shift schedule from the warehouse, printed out, which established exactly where I was on every night he’d claimed lodging for two.

I did not tell her to punish him. I told her the truth and I let the truth be as heavy as it was.

What happened at the table

Paula didn’t make a scene. She asked Roy if he’d prefer to speak privately. He said no — I think because he still believed, at that point, that this was about something else, and that leaving the room would look like guilt.

So she said it in front of his mother.

She laid out the dates. She read the lodging claims. She read the two-person per diems. Marlene, who is eighty-one and who I called every Sunday for two years to reassure, put her hand over her mouth and left it there.

Dale said, “Roy. Tell me she’s wrong.”

Roy didn’t say anything. That was the answer.

Sloane, who had come, who had worn a nice dress, said one thing — “You told me the hospital gave you that money” — and then she got her purse and walked out my front door, and as far as I know she has not spoken to him since.

The aftermath

The foundation referred the file. Roy is repaying just over nineteen thousand dollars under an agreement his own lawyer negotiated, on a monthly schedule that will take him roughly six years. He was permanently barred from the assistance program and the volunteer transport program was audited, which is its own quiet consequence — Sloane lost her volunteer role, not for the affair, but because her name was on the paperwork.

The separation agreement was signed in a lawyer’s office in October. He did not receive any interest in the lake house. He was never going to. That part was never a fight; it was only ever a fantasy he’d said out loud in my kitchen.

Marlene calls me every Sunday now. She’s the one who calls. I let her.

Renata does not speak to her father. I have not encouraged that and I have not discouraged it. She’s thirty-four and it isn’t mine to manage.

What I actually think about it

People want me to say it felt good.

It didn’t feel good. Watching an eighty-one-year-old woman learn what her son did with money meant for dying people did not feel good.

What feels good is smaller than that.

I went up to Petenwell alone in late October, after the paperwork was done. I opened the cottage, ran the water until it stopped running brown, and sat on my father’s dock in a coat with a cup of coffee while the lake went gray.

For twenty-two months I had not had one hour that belonged to me. Not one. Every hour was scheduled against someone else’s body.

I sat there until my coffee went cold, and I did not have to be anywhere.

I’m fifty-nine. I still work nights. I’m going to keep working nights until I can retire in four years, and then I’m going to spend my summers at that lake.

Roy is welcome to whatever second chance he thinks he’s owed. He just isn’t spending it on mine.