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Chapter Thirteen
Now
“Dad?”
I looked away from the lake, hearing my oldest daughter’s voice calling me from the direction of the house. It was just as well.
Ryleigh and I had always seemed to need a push to get what we wanted from one another, and it was the daughter walking down the hill now that gave us our final one.
“Hey, sweetheart.”
Mykaela Grace, who looked so much like her mother, moved to my side. She was bundled in her snow gear, a wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders. “How are you doing?”
I slipped my arm around her upper back, pulling her to me. I didn’t answer her, though; instead, I was swept back into memories. Memories where I brought Ryleigh back to my place that last night, where she’d taken a look at my packed and bare apartment, and thought I was moving, leaving her and the baby in her belly behind.
The night I told her I wanted nothing more than for her tomove to San Diego with me—where, earlier in the day, I’d gotten word I’d be playing the next season. I’d help figure out her studio lease; I just didn’t want to leave her behind. I’d finally gotten my NHL call-up, but it meant nothing to me if I couldn’t have Ryleigh at my side.
She’d cried.
I’d hugged her.
We talked about her being pregnant and what life would be like moving forward.
…and then she agreed to move to California with me.
“The littles are starting to go down,” Myke told me, leaning into my side. “Thought you’d want to come up and say goodnight.”
“I’ll be up in a moment.”
Myke nodded and kissed my cheek before heading back up to the house.
The house that held so many memories.
Memories like that first Christmas. I taught Ryleigh how to ice skate on this very lake.
Then, throughout the years, we’d come back. Eventually, my parents willed it to us and it remained the home where we held family holidays and get-togethers. We came every summer, from the summer Ryleigh and I married, through the summer six months past.
This was essentially our summer home. I watched my kids grow up on this lake—swimming in the summers, skating in the winters. I watched my family grow at this house—the earlier summers, when Caleb brought his first son, then his second…
I could remember his daughter Brielle running through the water, the summer before she passed away. God, that had only been three years ago.
Three years ago, was the turning point for our family.
First, we lost Bri.
A little over a year later, Porter was a walking disaster after Avery and Asher, his wife, were taken by Asher’s former foster father. Asher didn’t come out of the ordeal as well as Avery did, and it tore my son up.
Then, just before last Christmas, Ryleigh came to me with tears in her eyes…
It’s cancer.
It wasn’t supposed to be so.
I could remember her first cancer scare, but it was for a mole. The damn doctor’s appointment that she’d gone to, without telling me, nearly broke us up. That was in the first few months of our relationship. She’d been scared, and she tried to push me away.
It had been nothing, but it was then she learned that she carried the breast cancer gene. Ryleigh’s family had a history of skin cancer, which was why the mole freaked her out, but breast cancer wasn’t anywhere on her radar. So, to be proactive, she had a double mastectomy shortly after Porter was born.
She wasn’t supposed to die from cancer.
