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A tired sigh left her mouth, and for some reason, my heart dropped into my stomach before she even spoke. “I have lung cancer, Cash. I’m not just here for pneumonia. They’re doing tests to see how much it has spread.
”
I sucked in a breath, absorbing what she’d just confessed. Cancer. Spreading. The thought that this tough as nails woman could succumb to such a disease didn’t make sense to me. I knew cancer was something that could touch anyone, rich or poor, young or old. But Gigi was too cantankerous for cancer to fuck with her.
I had to clear my throat before I could speak again. “How bad is it?”
She shrugged, like it was nothing more consequential than telling me it was going to rain tomorrow. “Stage 4.”
My mind went crazy, trying to remember what the stages of cancer meant. Was it like DEFCON, where one was the worst? Or was it the other way around? Four could mean anything…
“It’s terminal, Cash,” she supplied with a completely neutral face, giving away none of her emotions. “The doctor says I have a year at the most—if I follow the treatment plan he wants to implement immediately.”
“If?” I choked out, fighting and losing the battle over my emotions. “What the fuck do you mean ‘if,’ Gigi?”
“Language,” she chastised me with a glower.
“Gigi,” I muttered in exasperation. “You don’t tell me that you’re dying and then expect me to act like a goddamn robot. I’m not Dad.”
“I’m not dead yet, mister. You aren’t going to use that kind of language around me.” She folded her hands in her lap primly, giving me that same look she used to reserve for only me when I was a boy and had disappointed her in some way. That look had the ability to make me feel about three inches tall no matter how old I was.
“Sorry,” I grumbled.
“I’m sorry, did you say something?” She touched a hand to her ear. “I didn’t catch that.”
I scrubbed a hand over my face, mentally cursing up a storm at how big a pain in the ass this woman was. As I pushed my hair back from my brow, I met her gaze. “I apologize, Gigi.”
A smirk teased at her lips. “Apology accepted.”
“Now, please, just tell me what you mean by this ‘if’ nonsense.”
She lowered her lashes, but I saw the flicker of emotions in them before she could mask it. Fear. Doris Mathias was scared, and that terrified me like nothing else could. “They want to do some high doses of chemotherapy, radiation. Medications. And even with that, they can only say I might have a year. Maybe. What kind of life would that year be, though? I would rather have a few months with my dignity than a year with no quality of life.”
“You’re just going to give up?” I exclaimed, staggered by her confession.
“I don’t see it as giving up,” she assured me, completely stone-faced now. “I’m just putting it into God’s hands.”
“Bullshit,” I exploded. “You’re just going to throw in the towel and let this disease swallow you whole. That’s not the Gigi I know and love. That’s not the woman who raised me never to back down from anything.”
“That woman is now old and tired, Cash,” she murmured, and it was only then I saw just how weak she really was. Her shoulders, normally so straight and proud, were slumped as if they could no longer hold up the weight of her body. There was a yellow tint to her eyes that I hadn’t noticed before. In that moment, I realized she was much sicker than she was allowing the world to see, including me.
“I don’t want you to die, Gigi,” I whispered, my heart breaking, tears clogging my throat. “I don’t want to lose you for real.”
The crack in my voice had her head snapping up. “Regardless of when I die, you will never lose me.”
“Is that why you wanted to see me?” I demanded, angry at the tears that were burning my eyes, pissed at her for letting so much time go by before reaching out to me after the fallout with Dad. Mad at the fucking world because cancer wasn’t supposed to touch my family. They were the goddamn Mathias clan. Nothing and no one could tell them to bow. Especially not Gigi. “To tell me you’re dying?”
She straightened her shoulders, lifting her head proudly, and the look in her eyes was back to the one I remembered so clearly. “No, actually. That’s not why I asked you to come.”
“Figures,” I muttered half under my breath. Grabbing the chair from the corner of the room, I dropped it beside her bed and sat. Stretching out my legs, I opened my hands, offering her to lay it all out. “Let’s hear it.”
Chapter 1
Amara
Throwing my hair up into a knot, I grabbed the bottle of sunscreen and started slathering my entire body. The temps were going to be in the nineties with clear skies, and if I was going to be outside in it all day, I desperately needed to make sure every exposed inch of skin was protected.
Riley came out of the bathroom in nothing more than her panties. A wall of steam followed after her, trying to suck her back into the bathroom. “You look like a tacky tourist right now,” my roommate snickered as she grabbed her bikini top and tied it in place. “Why are you wearing socks up to your knees? It’s like ninety degrees out there.”
