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She slowly nods.
“Baby, just don’t let me get in a car, and I’ll live forever.”
“Done,” she whispers, leaning toward me and kissing my forehead.
“You can go do something. Just let me rest,” I mumble.
“I can’t leave you.”
I know you can’t, sweetheart. So I’ll do it for you. I’ll do it for us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
THE PERFECT TRAGEDY.
Scottie
“How do you do it?”I murmur, ghosting my finger over the lid to Price’s record player after he pauses and takes a long breath.
A woman named Amelia has his child and his heart.
It’s perfect. And tragic.
“Do what?”
“How do you show up in my life after no word from you for twelve years and look at me like you never stopped loving me? Yet you fell in love with a woman who ran you over, and you have a child … a whole life with her.”
“I guess I’m lucky in love but not in life.”
I sit on the opposite end of the sofa, and a spiral-bound notebook catches my attention. “Are you journaling?”
“Sort of. Among other things.”
“Other things?” I hug my knees to my chest.
A wry grin settles on his lips. “Have a look.” He nods to the notebook.
“You want me to read your journal?”
“I don’t care if you read it. It’s basically a hard-to-follow story of my marriage interwoven with my mental shift since my diagnosis. But that’s not what I want you to see.”
I lower my feet to the ground and slowly reach for the journal.
“I can draw,” he says when I open it to the first page.
It’s a cat in a window. And it’s incredibly detailed. “Price, this is …” I flip through more pages, not stopping on the ones with writing. They’re too personal and not for my eyes. “How did you not know you could draw?” I chuckle, admiring his detailed drawings.
“I never took the time to listen.”
“To listen to what?” I glance over at him.
A victorious smile graces his face. “Ah … the student has become the teacher.”
I surrender with a slight nod and a knowing grin.
“I’ve never taken the time to listen to my body. I don’t mean just acknowledging the pain. Imagine all the gifts people have but don’t take the time to listen. I never sat with a pencil in my hand and no purpose—I never doodled. It’s tragic.”
Again, I thumb through the drawings. “Is this your wife?” It’s a woman with an open book in her hands, but she’s looking up from it with her lower lip trapped between her teeth.
