I sit up immediately, my mind fully alert but my subconscious telling me I’m crazy, all while my rational mind runs through a series of thoughts that are far from welcome. My breaths come out in sharp rasps. I tell myself it’s because I’ve moved so quickly, but I know the truth: The fear has taken hold.

I tell myself I was half asleep, my skin really was pinched, and that there’s nothing there to cause pain. No tumor, no cancer, nothing like Lex.

Next I take a calming breath, my fingers already moving toward my left breast. But whereas my routine checks are usually timid and gentle—more afraid of what I’ll find than not knowing what is there—I find myself pressing as hard as I can, being overly thorough. I become frantic in my movements as my mind starts running a million miles an hour. I keep moving in circles with the pads of my three fingers, but as memories and fear and disbelief start to collide, there is no rhyme or reason to my actions. I pull at the tissue, pressing my fingers together on both sides of the stretched skin, causing myself pain as I try to feel any trace of something.

Sitting in Becks’s bed with a stream of moonlight falling over it, I manage to work myself into a frenzy when I should be snuggled up against the handsome man fast asleep beside me—living, feeling, loving. I don’t know how much time passes because I’m so worried, so panicked that a mist of sweat coats my skin, and at some point, I must have started to cry because I taste salt from the tears that leaked out and reached my lips. My hands are trembling, and my mind is chastising me for not being able to re-create the same sensation that I felt moments ago.

Was it just moments ago? All I can think about is the possible parasite beneath my breast that threatens to take the life from me. I just about give up, my breast sore and reddened from my probing and prodding, my nerves so damn frayed that connecting one thought to another is nearly impossible. I glance at the clock and realize I’ve been at this for a half an hour. I haven’t found anything yet … no lump, no bump, no dimple. I’m just making myself hysterical.

Calm down, Had. You’re jumping to conclusions. It was nothing. You were asleep and you were thinking of Lex and it was just a pinch.

Quietly I sigh, glancing over at Becks to make sure he’s still asleep. I’ve already lost it once tonight with him, so this is the last thing I need him to see. He’s a patient man, but I think he just might give me the balcony exit if I lose it again.

As my shoulders sag, I tell myself one more time. I’ll examine myself one more time and then be done with it for the early-morning hours. I raise my hand and go through the motions, a slight sense of ease settling over me, when I just about stop and I feel it.

I freeze.

My fingers stop moving, the tissue still pinched between them. My eyes widen. My shaky inhale of breath fills the silence of the room.

My body stops, but my mind races as my whole world comes crashing down around me. I raise a trembling hand to stifle the choked sob that never comes. My eyes blur as I shake my head back and forth in shock, images of Lexi colliding against one another in my mind.

Time passes as I sit paralyzed with fear, numb with disbelief, and void of emotion.

Becks shifts in bed, and the movement jolts me to the here and now. I tell myself the lump is tiny, could be fibrous tissue, for all I know, but I don’t believe my own lies. I know it’s something more because I’ve made it a point to know my breasts in and out over the past year. I try to hold on, but I feel like my thoughts are slipping away from me as a false, eerie calm begins to settle over my body.

My hands shake and my mind tries to process but just keeps coming up empty. I won’t allow it to go where my biggest fears lies, so I focus instead on right now. On the man beside me. On how I just opened up my heart, invited him in, and told him we are, and then look what happened.

I rise from the bed without thinking of collateral damage or the fallout. Of Becks lying in bed asleep and what to say to him because there is nothing I can say but sorry—and sorry doesn’t cut shit right now. Sorry doesn’t ease the overwhelming sense of disbelief that has struck me. The overused word doesn’t ease the sting of loss, of watching your loved one die, or of leaving someone so they don’t have to go through it and suffer with you.

I keep my eyes averted from him as I pull my clothes on and dress quietly on autopilot, focusing on zippers and buttons, habitual actions. I have to physically think to do each thing, perform each routine movement because when I don’t, I find that I just stand there and stare out the window to the world outside.

Carrying on like everything is fine when it’s clearly not.

Once I’m fully dressed, shoes in my hand so I don’t wake him up with their sound on the floor, my feet are still rooted in place. My chest physically hurts, and my head is pounding. My eyes burn, and my heart feels like it’s being twisted, acid eating holes through the muscle at a menacing pace.

I glance over to Becks and stare at him through the light of the night from beyond the windows. There are so many things I want to say to him, but all I keep thinking is how I jinxed everything. Tonight I went against everything I had promised myself, and look how fate came with a cruel backhand to put me in my proper place.

I should be used to it. Expect it. Right when everything was okay with Rylee and Colton from their hospital stints—just when my closest friend in the whole world was looking toward happily ever after, my sister was staring down a loaded shotgun.

These memories flicker and then flood me—accompanying her to mammograms, then her double mastectomy, brushing her hair as clumps fell out, her fighting the fight and exhausting all resources—until I feel like I’m suffocating, reaffirming the fact that I can’t do this to Becks. A raw sadness marries with the grief I carry, and I tell him the empty words that I hate more than any others. “I’m sorry.”

The words feel like a noose closing over my neck.

I turn from the room and pad in my bare feet out to the family room, where I realize I don’t have my purse or my keys. I spot his wallet on the coffee table where he left it open when he pulled the condom out earlier and add injury to insult when I pull on the twenty-dollar bill partially exposed from it. I hate doing this, but I don’t have any other option. Just another reason for him to hate me even more. For him to validate his earlier accusation that I’m a coward.

Because if I didn’t acknowledge it before, doing this makes it pretty clear as fucking day that I am.

But I don’t know what else to do right now. I’ll pay him back. I look over my shoulder through the open doorway to where he sleeps peacefully, and then I walk to the front door and slip out to the streets below to hail a cab.

The guilt is heavy and oppressive, dropping through my soul and occupying my thoughts just as handily as the fear sitting in its worn recliner, where the feeling has made itself comfortable over the past six months. All I keep thinking is, he doesn’t deserve this.

Hell, neither do I.



Chapter 15

The room is cold, and the worn pad on the hospital’s gurney beneath me is anything but comfortable. Hell, if it were a mattress from the Ritz, I wouldn’t think it’s comfortable because I swear to God these cold, clinical walls of the outpatient procedure room suction every ounce of life from me with each passing moment.

The valium I’ve taken slowly kicks in as the nurse makes casual comments here and there, nothing I need to answer—just innocent conversation to fill the silence and pass time. She hums softly to herself now as she lays instruments on the tray beside me with a sterile clink. I can hear my phone buzzing in my purse, which is sitting under the chair across the room, and I swallow over the lump in my throat, hoping it’s not Becks. Again.

It’s amazing how many times someone can try to contact you in a seventy-two-hour period.

His first round of texts started at seven a.m. the morning I left; his messages reflected concern at first and then slowly morphed to frustrated anger the longer I ignored him. My lone response after the first hour passed was lame but honest all at the same time. I’m sorry. I thought I could do this, but I can’t was all my text said, and it did nothing to stop the barrage of his replies. And each alert, each ding, was like adding salt to my open wound because lying to someone else is one thing, but lying to yourself is impossible.

So I’ve turned my anger at myself onto him, blaming him for making me want something I can’t have right now. I’ll let it manifest into annoyance from his persistence and then irritation so I can pass the phone without wanting to pick it up to see if he has or hasn’t texted.

And I’m not even sure which one of those I want more: to be ignored or to be pursued.

The hum of the phone vibrating pulls me from my thoughts, and I giggle. I know it’s inappropriate for the situation, but the soft edges the valium gives me makes me feel warm and fuzzy that he’s calling me again. But I don’t want to giggle. I want to be angry with him for continuing to call and text me. I’m selfish, damn it. Can’t he see that? I snuck out in the middle of the night without so much as a See you later, Charlie Brown…. The giggles take over again at the thought of Snoopy and Charlie.

A momentary peace settles over me, and I definitely want some more of this shit they gave me. It’s more than just the valium, but whatever they put in that shot to relax me some … it’s nice. Like riding-on-a-cloud nice. Like “sinking into the mattress with Becks’s weight on top of me” nice.