That coward. I’d never understood how years of love could turn to hate in an instant, but if I saw my father right now, I’d be hard pressed to keep myself out of prison.
“How dare he?” I whispered, and it came out like a hiss.
“What’s done is done.” Mom was trying to be strong, but her voice quavered as she settled onto the bed beside me. She wrapped her arms around me, offering me comfort when her husband of almost three decades had abandoned her in her time of need.
If I ever had a question before about who the strong one was in their marriage, my mother answered it fully and completely.
“We’re going to be fine,” I told her, vowing it to myself at the same time.
“Of course we will,” she reassured me.
We both knew we were lying. Nothing would ever be fine again.
Twenty-nine years of marriage, and my father couldn’t manage to stick around through that last one because he didn’t want to watch his wife die.
*
Present day
When I finish, Dane’s hands are balled into tight fists despite the empathy in his eyes.
“He didn’t deserve either of you.”
“I’ve told myself the same thing, but it still hurts.”
I swipe at my tears and take a deep breath. Now that the dam has been breached, the rest comes pouring out.
“When my mom died, Benjie was afraid I was going to crawl into the grave with her. I wanted to. For weeks after we buried her, I went through the motions, but I was dead inside. ALS is a horrific disease because it steals everything from you. She couldn’t walk. Couldn’t talk. Couldn’t feed herself. She refused to go on a ventilator once her breathing became impaired, because she didn’t want to drag it out.”
Tears pour down my face as I recall those awful days. I would have given anything to ease her suffering.
“How could something so terrible happen to the best woman I’ve ever known? She was so good, so sweet. A better person than me, by far. She would take her old purses and fill them with the hotel toiletry bottles I brought back from business trips, protein bars, bottles of water, and some cash, and give them to homeless women downtown when she went out shopping. She volunteered every month at a soup kitchen. She never missed a Sunday at church except the morning I broke my ankle when I was twelve. It wasn’t fair! She shouldn’t have had to suffer like that.”
By the time I finish, my breath comes in strangled sobs. “I miss her so much.”
Dane slides up the bed and wraps both arms around me, pulling me against his chest. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“I should’ve been there more for her, but if I didn’t go to work, then we couldn’t pay for her care. Insurance would only cover so much, and I wanted her to have the best. She gave me everything, and it was my turn to give it back to her. It might have been different if my dad hadn’t walked out on her.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because thinking about it nearly breaks me every time,” I say as Dane holds both my cheeks and catches more tears on his thumbs. “She didn’t want me to work so hard. She hated being a burden, but she wasn’t. She was my mom. Some days I think she willed it to go faster so I didn’t have to watch her suffer for longer. I held her hand when she passed, and I wanted to die too.”
Those months were such a blur, except for the day when we laid her in the ground and Benjie wrapped me in his arms. “You have to live for her now, Kitty Kat. She would want you to.”
“Benjie made me realize that acting like I was buried with her would just piss Mom off. So I went back to work. I went through the motions. I had to live because she couldn’t. He made me. And by the time I met you, I’d gotten really good at faking it. So good that I even believed it myself. I stopped talking about her, and I hate that too.”
“I wish you’d told me. This isn’t something you should’ve had to carry alone.”
Dane holds me tighter and I suck in a breath, knowing it’s time to tell him the part that haunts me every day.
“There’s still more.”
“Kat—”
“I haven’t been tested.”
Dane’s head jerks back, and his brown eyes search my face. “Why would you need to be tested?”
I hiccup and get ready to put my greatest fear into words. “I could have it too. ALS can be genetic. Every time my hand shakes, I tell myself I’m a coward for not getting tested, but I don’t know if I can live knowing that I’m going to die that way. So instead, I started this all on a lie. Everything. And I never told you. I just kept it going.”
Dane’s arms flex, and he tucks me into his chest again. “It wasn’t a lie. None of it. You were dealing the only way you knew how. There’s not a damn thing wrong with that. Whatever happens next, we face it together.”
I cling to him like he’s a rock in the ocean and I’m being battered by waves. The rock I wouldn’t let him be when I needed him most.
The days after Benjie died without telling anyone he had cancer.
Chapter 9
Dane
I’m a fucking fraud. My wife is baring her soul by sharing her secrets, except they aren’t secrets. I know all of it. About her piece-of-shit dad, the painful decline of her mother, and how Kat shouldered the whole thing.
The only thing I didn’t know, and I could kill him myself for not telling either of us, was that Benjie was dying. I should have seen it. I should have known something was wrong the day he tracked me down at the bar a few blocks from our apartment while I was waiting for Kat.
*
One year and two months ago
I ordered a Crown and Coke as I waited for Kat, knowing she was going to be at least fifteen minutes late. I called it Kat time, and since I knew she was probably at the office still answering one more e-mail, I wasn’t going to hold it against her. After ten months of our unconventional marriage, with both of us traveling more than we were home, I finally had her mostly figured out.
Or so I thought.