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My gaze drags across Dan’s as I leave the room, and then I’m hurrying down the stairs, moving into the kitchen, getting him a glass of water, snagging the bottle of Tylenol from the cabinet. I tuck the latter under my arm, snag my snack and chocolate milk—because I know he won’t let it go, and I’d rather eat my snack in bed beside him than continue arguing with him about it.
Then I carry everything upstairs, footsteps silent on the carpet as I move down the hall.
But their voices, softly echoing out into the hallway, aren’t.
“That’s none of your business.” Stefan’s tone is weary, exhausted, and I slide to a stop, heart suddenly in my throat.
“Enough fucking excuses,” my brother says. “You need to tell her.” A beat. “Or I will.”
“She’s had a hard enough time lately without dealing with her husband having?—”
I drop the plate, the glass of water, the milk, making a giant mess on the carpet.
But I barely register it.
Because the rest of Stefan’s sentence is echoing through my mind.
And I can’t process it.
Because I couldn’t have possibly heard that.
I didn’t fucking hear that.
I couldn’t have.
Dan’s head is suddenly poking out through the doorway, expression stark.
But I can’t process that either, can’t process that he knew and didn’t tell me, can’t process that the secret the man I love kept from me was this big.
This devastating.
I push past my brother, rush over to the bed, to my husband who’s?—
A fucking liar.
“You have fucking cancer?” I blurt.
Thirty-Five
Stefan
“You have fucking cancer?”
I freeze, know that horror’s written all over my face, because I see the same in Dan’s as we look from each other…to Brit, now standing next to the bed.
And she’s…
Devastated.
Tears filling her eyes, obscuring the chocolate-brown irises. “Please tell me I’m having some sort of delusion,” she says. “Please tell me that I didn’t fucking hear that you have cancer.”
“Brit,” I begin, sitting up, swinging my legs over the edge of the mattress, hating the way the fatigue claws at me. I mostly feel fine with all of this shit, normal except for the lump in my balls, the slight soreness. But it’s the tiredness that is the worst.
Pervasive, comes on without warning.
And then I can be fine for days, for weeks, for so long it seems like I made it all up.
Only…
