Before she met him, she was not truthful. She was just the kid who hung around the movie sets on nineteenth street, wishing she could lie professionally.

If she wasn't one to tell the truth, then he lied so bad that his clothes were stained and his teeth reeked and it was all permanent. His mother never taught him how to tell the truth.

But they worked, somehow.

On the day they met, the man I was working with told me that I should quit treating him on account of him being allergic to love and nothing was ever going to stop those two. I chuckled, like I was something other than right out of med school, and in the alleyway behind the hospital, they traded names. I thought he was crazy.

She told him she was the girl who stole her eyes from the stars and he said to call him the boy with the broken feet. To him, the only use of feet was to climb to the stars and if he couldn't do that, they might as well be broken.

When they first came to the hospital, I was treating a broken smile in a girl who had stopped trusting her immune system. That day she was seven. The day they married, three years later, she wasn't ten. She was dead.

The boy with the broken feet and the girl who stole her eyes from the stars heard each other's names for the first time on their wedding day. They couldn't very well say, "Do you, boy with the broken feet, take the girl who stole her eyes from the stars as your lawfully wedded wife?" and "Do you, girl who stole her eyes from the stars, take the boy with the broken feet as your lawfully wedding husband?"

I know that because I met her on her wedding day, after the girl with the dishonest immune system died. I never spoke to him but she thought he was like her, and when he was with her he always told the truth even though he was liar, so he must be crazy.

"Doctor, doctor!" she said.
"Yes, ma'm?" I said.
"My boy, my poor broken footed boy." she said.
So i checked his feet and they looked fine.

"No, sir, no, no. His heart- I've broken it." she said.
"Ok." I said.
I checked his pulse; it was normal.
"Ma'am, would you like me to do an echocardiogram?"
"No, no. We're really here because I ruined his ambitions. He wanted to be a sailor, but instead he found me in the parking lot outside the movie set on nineteenth street and I swept him away. He would have been a good sailor."
"Ma'am, what do you want me to do?"
"Save him, save him! Save my boy with the broken feet. His feet are broken because he can't reach the stars."
"Ma'am, he seems fine."
"He couldn't be, he loves me."