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Pauline pauses outside the door to Kathryn’s dimly lit room. “She’s been sleeping on and off for a bit. Stay as long you like. If she wakes up, I know she’ll be happy to see familiar faces.”
She leaves us then, explaining that she needs to speak with Kathryn’s oncologist. Nick and I quietly enter the room. He directs me to the cushioned vinyl recliner in the corner while he seems to prefer to stand, ignoring the metal guest chair situated at the foot of the bed. For a long time, we simply wait amid the steady beep and hiss of monitors.
I notice Nick has hardly looked at Kathryn since we came in. His gaze darts aimlessly from one thing in the room to another. Never at the bed or the machines. Never at her lying so still on the bed. He once cared for Kathryn enough to be her lover for a time and although they had their falling out years ago, I don’t expect it’s easy for him to see her like this.
Resting on the elevated mattress, she looks pale and dramatically frailer than when I saw her just this morning. Her steel-gray hair is thin and matted against her skull, her cheeks sallow and gaunt. An oxygen tube rides under her nose, and taped to the back of her hand and the bend of her elbow are IV lines running from mu
ltiple bags hanging from the pole at her bedside.
She stirs, moaning softly in her drugged sleep.
At her sudden agitation, Nick begins to pace silently near the door while I go to her side and gently comb her hair with my fingers.
“It’s okay, Kathryn,” I tell her, despite that she probably can’t hear me. I need to say the words in case she can. “You just rest, now and feel better.”
When I glance at Nick, I find him watching me. There is a heartbreaking tenderness in his eyes but there is also pain. There is an anxiety about him that he is struggling to keep clamped up tight, yet I see it in the careful set of his jaw. I feel it in the grim tension that’s practically rolling off him where he stands.
Good Lord. He is miserable in this room—in this place. And while I know he understands the gravity of Kathryn’s condition, I sense his distress is coming from a deeper place.
When Pauline appears at the door and quietly enters, he jolts at the intrusion.
“Avery, can I speak to you in the hall for a moment?”
My gaze slides to Nick for a second, but if he feels at all reluctant to stay behind in the room, he doesn’t let on.
No, all I see in his face now that we’re not alone is calm control and confidence. I see the facade of cool detachment that Dominic Xavier Baine presents to the world. The one he presented to me in the beginning, too, before I learned to see past it.
But have I really?
The question clings to me as I follow Kathryn’s nurse out to the corridor.
Chapter 16
A hissed curse gusts out of me the instant Avery exits the room.
Jesus. Get a fucking grip.
Bad enough I nearly pussied out in front of her at the rec center with some pathetic sob story about my less than perfect childhood. Now this?
I don’t realize I’m pacing again until I glance out the window and see her looking my way while she speaks with Kathryn’s private nurse. It’s the only thing that halts my steps—that look that says she’s just as concerned about me as she is the friend who’s slowly perishing day by day before her eyes.
I know she senses my discomfort in being in this godforsaken place.
I hate that I can’t hide that from her the way I can with anyone else.
No, Avery knows me too well. And if I don’t pull my shit together, I’m only going to add undue worry to an already painful day for her.
I force myself to take a seat in the metal guest chair at the foot of the bed. Try to tune out the noise of the monitors beeping with Kathryn’s vitals and the various diagnostics that run automatically from a computer hooked up to wires and lines attached to various parts of her diseased body.
I tell myself not to think about another hospital room, and another frail, deteriorating body.
But the memories are already resurrected. They’ve been haunting me ever since Avery and I arrived.
“Are you gonna die, Mom?”
“Oh, honey.” Sad, dove-gray eyes look up at me where I stand at the side of her hospital bed. “That’s the last thing I want you to worry about. I’m sick, but I’m fighting this with all I’ve got. You believe me, don’t you, sweetheart?”
I nod, but I’m not sure what I believe. She’s never lied to me before, but each time I’ve come to see her in this place she looks smaller. Weaker. As if she’s disappearing breath by breath.
