Vital Signs

More and more every day I find myself drawn into the puzzle of her speech, determined to unravel meaning in each sentence, because now I’m sure it’s there, if I only listen to her in a way I have failed to listen for thirty years. – From Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt

When Anna, Mike's beautiful and self-possessed wife, begins to mangle her sentences as a result of a brain aneurysm that could kill her at any moment, it's as if Mike has woken from a long dream in which he was only thinking about himself.

Or is he still only thinking about himself?

Incoherent with guilt, he uses his talent as a graphic artist to draw his way closer to his wife, trying to communicate with her, and himself too, through signs and symbols. In his panic to show his wife that she has been his entire universe, will he finally confess all the ways in which he rebelled against her power over him, the way he betrayed her?

In this poignant and profoudnly intimate novel, Tessa McWatt takes us deep into the workings of a couple in crisis, into the lies and the truths necessary to sustain a marriage, teasing out the unspoken rules that run—or ruin—relationships.