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“They won’t test a minor, so we don’t know. Obviously she knows about the mutation and the possibility she’ll have it. She’s buried too many people she loves not to know. We call it our family curse.” Siena took a great, heaving breath and said the rest. “She doesn’t have anybody but me, and I have the mutation. I had to do something to make the best chance I could of staying around for her, and there’s one thing that drops my odds significantly—still more than women without the mutation, but way less than basically the guarantee of cancer I’d have had otherwise. I had prophylactic surgery.”
“Proph—” He realized what she meant and sagged to the back of the sofa. “You’re saying ...”
“Bilateral mastectomy and a complete hysterectomy, a few months after we buried our mom.” Her throat felt tight again and she coughed. “I know I overreacted when you asked your question, whichwasshitty, but probably only annoying to most women. To me, it was like you stuck your hands into my tenderest wound.”
He dragged a hand through his thick, curly, almost black hair. It was shiny, and the few strands of grey at his temples were like tinsel. “Goddamn, I’m so sorry I asked that stupid fucking question. I was—” He cut off and shook his head. “I’m an asshole.”
“Maybe. And maybe I’m a bitch. But people make judgments without knowing all the facts, so everybody can be an asshole, or a bitch, or whatever sometimes, and everybody can also bethoughtto be an asshole or a bitch when really they’re just ... I don’t know. Going through more than they can deal with.”
“Yeah. Shit.”
Siena would have said Cooper was a talker. A guy who liked to talk, was good at it, liked to be the center of attention, could sweet talk and cajole, could tell a good yarn. But she’d rendered him all but speechless.
That was good, actually. He wasn’t trying to fill up her story with his words. He was listening.
“I didn’t tell you to get sympathy. I didn’t really even tell you to explain why I was so hurt that night. The main reason I’m telling you is last night, after I got home, I watched a bunch of jiu-jitsu videos, trying to understand what it was. If you do still want to train me, it seems like you’ll be able to tell what’s under my shirt. Or what isn’t.”
She’d thought she wanted to stave off another awful question by telling him the truth, but now that she’d said it, the story itself seemed more important. The act of telling him about this thing, this defining feature of her life, had lightened something inside her. Her mind quieted a little. And when she inhaled, she was able to take in all the air she needed—the difference felt like she’d been suffocating for years, so slowly she hadn’t realized it.
Cooper sat across the room from her, silently staring. She couldn’t read his expression. Her story was over, and now she wanted him to talk. She needed to know what he was thinking.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Cooper had no ideawhat he was thinking. There was so much noise in his head he struggled to pull even one clear thought from the chaos. So he sat there and stared while he tried to sort things out in his noggin.
Siena had just told him that she’d probably die of cancer, and that she’d had her breasts cut off and her insides gutted so that she could try to stave off that fate—not for herself but to stay alive for her sister.
It was obvious that she’d told him to try get ahead of any further shitty questions on his part—and didn’t he feel like a real bastardnowfor asking that stupid question in the first place—and he could also see that she was girded for him to be repulsed by her story, to be imagining what she looked like naked and coming up disgusted.
She was wrong. He wasn’t repulsed. He wasn’t thinking of her body almost at all.
The thoughts coming clear were about hismother, of all things. That was going to take a lot more time to unpack than he had right now, with Siena watching him, waiting for a reaction, but he needed to at least get hold of it. Why the fuck was he thinking about that desiccated old bitch?
It was the starkness of the comparison, he thought. Siena had literally sacrificed pieces of herself out of love for her sister. There was no time in his life that Cooper’s mother would have sacrificed so much as the last half of a smoke for him.
She’d probably argue that she’d sacrificed everything by having him at all, but that was a her problem, not a him problem. He hadn’t had any control over being born. He was her son; nothing about her life was his choice or his fault.
But he didn’t care about that; he’d given up expecting anything from his mother long ago, while he was still a kid. So why was she standing in the middle of his brain, her face in its usual disgusted twist?
“Cooper, please say something,” Siena said, her voice soft and pleading.
He cleared his throat and tried to dredge words up through the narrow path he’d made. Not many made it to the destination. “I ... shit.”
Her laugh was sharp and defensive. He could see landmines arming all through her. “Yeah. Okay.” She stood. “I’m gonna go. Thanks for the offers of help, but I’ll pass.”
