by K. A. Linde
Jem’s mouth dropped open. “You’re wearing a princess dress.” She twirled her finger in place. “Do a spin!”
I laughed at her command but twirled on the spot as if I’d been meant for it. It had been a long time since I’d been in ballet, but the turn came back to me effortlessly.
Jem looked breathless with delight. “I need one. Frank, get me a matching princess dress.”
“Right away, Your Majesty,” he said, bowing at the waist. He fiddled with a few more things. “All right, I’m going to leave you with your visitor for a few minutes, but after that, you need to rest. You always get exhausted after a chemo session. I don’t want the excitement to wear you down even more.”
“Aye, aye, captain,” she said, offering him a mock salute.
Jerry nodded at me. “I’ll be back in ten.”
“Sounds good. Thanks.”
Jerry disappeared down the hallway, and I took a seat in the chair opposite Jem’s bed. She leaned back in her bed and released a huff of air.
“I wish you’d come at a different time, Princess Katherine,” Jem said.
“Well, why don’t you let me know a good time, and I can come again?”
“You mean it?”
“Sure. I’m going to volunteer here regularly now.”
Jem looked at me with naked disbelief in her eyes. As if people had said that one too many times. Even this angel of a child had cynicism. “Okay. Well, Thursdays are bad. But on Wednesdays, I get to do art. Can you draw?”
“Not at all,” I told her. “But I can dance.”
“I love to dance,” Jem told me. “Dance and draw and run around and slides and singing and getting my nails painted and playing dress-up and having tea.”
“I like all of those things.”
“Oh, good. You’d be a villain again if you didn’t like fun.”
I cracked a smile. “Another reasonable reference.”
I wanted to ask more questions. I wanted to ask why she was here and how long she’d been sick. I wanted to ask about her parents and how often they showed up and why they weren’t here now, right after she had treatment. I wanted to find out how this precious child had so much life, considering her circumstances.
I could see that her playing pretend was her way of coping. I knew a little too much about that. But without meaning to, I cared for this kid. I saw my old self in her. I wanted to know more.
“Hey, Jem,” I whispered. “Why are you here?”
She smiled softly at me, stifling a yawn. “Cancer ward.”
“Right. But…”
Jem waved her hand faintly. “It’s called ALL—acute lymphoblastic leukemia.” The big words sounded ridiculous, coming out of her small mouth. “My white blood cells are eating my body like a dragon breathing fire at the princess.”
I tried to hide my horror. I knew what leukemia was. I’d heard about it. And I’d known that she had to be here for something bad, but it still hurt to hear.
“Well, it’s good that you’re a dragon-slaying princess then, isn’t it?”
Jem’s eyes lit up. “You get me.”
She sank back into her bed. Another yawn hit her, and she tried to keep her eyes open.
“How about I come again next week? I bet I can bring in a surprise,” I told her.
“I’d like that,” she said through a yawn. “I’ll wait for you. Don’t be late.”
I stood as Jerry stepped back in, letting me know that our ten minutes were up. Jem was nearly asleep. I swallowed and then exited with Jerry.
“Are you okay?” he asked when we left. “You look a little shaken up.”
“She… she told me a little about her diagnosis—leukemia.”
He nodded. “It’s always hard to hear, but it’s actually the most common type of cancer in children.” He gestured for me to walk with him. We fell into step. “We’re hopeful in her case.”
“How does she stay so… happy?”
“That’s just Jem. She’s a ray of sunshine. Never let the diagnosis bring her down. She’s always been confident that she’ll beat this.”
“That’s incredible.”
“She really is. I wish I could say the same about her parents.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I noticed that they weren’t here either time I’ve been here.”
He wrinkled his nose. “I doubt you’ll ever meet them. It’s good that you’re coming around more to see her. She could use a friend.”
My stomach twisted at that. I didn’t like the idea that her family had abandoned her to this hospital. As mine had abandoned me. Even if my stay had only been for six excruciating weeks. This was something else altogether. How could they do it when their daughter was so amazing?
“I have to get back to my shift, but I hope you come back.”
“I will,” I told him confidently. Fear of hospitals or not, I wanted to see her.
I hurried down the hallway, another idea about what to do for Jem…and maybe the whole ward buzzing through my mind. I passed a group of women who also looked like they were here for volunteer hours and continued down the hall. I was almost to the exit when I heard my name.
“Katherine, is that you?” one of the women asked.
I turned around and was surprised to see a face that I recognized. Though… just barely. Last time I’d seen her, she had been under a hundred pounds, and her hair had been falling out. She’d been eating through a feeding tube for a while as the hospital tried to ween her off of purging everything she ate. We’d been in the same facility and then a closed therapy group in the city for a year after that.
“Melinda?” I asked in surprise.
“It is you!” Melinda leaned forward and pulled me into a hug.
She was no longer stick thin. She was now a shapely woman with sloping curves and a round face. Her hair fell to her shoulders and was as thick and curly as could be. She could have been a different person.
I held her at arm’s length. “How are you doing?”
“Excellent. Really excellent. I’m working with the church now. I’ve found my calling.”
“That’s great,” I told her.
“Yeah. I had a few rough years after we stopped our therapy sessions,” she confided. “I got married, but… it didn’t work out.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah.” She glanced down at the ground. “Maybe you’ll understand. It’s still hard to talk about at church.”
“Your divorce?” I asked.
She shook her head. “They’ve been understanding about that. But… you know, the infertility.”
My ears started ringing. I felt like someone had smashed cymbals against my head. “The… what?”
“Well, that’s why you’re here, right?” Melinda asked, biting her bottom lip. “This is the volunteer hour for the group I founded. It’s for women who are going through the same struggles I went through. I want them to know that they’re still strong, powerful women even though they can’t bring a child into this world. We have so many anorexia cases.”
Cotton balls clogged my throat. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think.
“Katherine?” she asked gently. “You can talk to me. We’d love to have you join us.”
“No,” I said roughly. “No, sorry, that’s… that’s not why I’m here. I’m working with ChildrensOne to plan an event to raise money for the cancer ward.”
“Oh!” Melinda said, putting her hand to her heart. “I am so sorry. Look at me, letting my passion for my cause get ahead of myself. Well, thank God Almighty for that. I worry every day for all the girls that we knew during our dark days.”
I nodded, feeling like I was going to throw up.
Infertile.
She’d used the word infertile.
I had known it was a possibility for people who had gone through anorexia. But I’d never considered it for myself. Not once.
I needed to get out of here. I needed to get far away. Somewhere safe, where I could hyperventilate in
privacy.
“It’s so good to see you again, Melinda, but I’m actually late for a meeting,” I lied.
She said something in return, but I hustled out of there as fast as I could. It wasn’t until I was in the comfort of my own car that I curled into a ball and tried to keep breathing.
21
Katherine
The logical thing to do would have been to take a deep breath and let it all out. Then release the panic quickly settling into my body and try to move on. Maybe even think about why this frightened me so much.
But I rushed right past logic into undeniable, impossible, desperate fear. Panic-inducing, hyperventilating, choking dread. And I couldn’t think and I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t feel. Not anything other than anxiety. There was nothing else, except that one question.
Am I infertile?
Tremors ran through my body. I didn’t know. I didn’t know the answer to that question. I hadn’t been as bad as Melinda, but we’d all been in the same hospital. We’d gone to therapy together for a year after that. She knew all the pains I’d had at the time. There was a reason I’d sharply cut anyone from that time out of my life. I didn’t want a constant reminder of what I’d done to myself and how hard I’d given up on everything.
The only people I still talked to who knew what had happened was my crew. They’d stuck with me through the worst of it and promptly never brought it up again after I demanded they stop babying me.
But now? Now, I felt like I was in free fall.
I hastily canceled my training session. There was no way I was going to be able to compartmentalize this before I saw Rodrigo. I didn’t even know when I’d be able to put myself back together.
The Mercedes dropped me off at my building, and I took the elevator to my penthouse. I marched right over to the wet bar and poured myself a stiff drink. I slurped it down and then poured another. I felt slightly more fortified after the first and took the second over to the couch.
I pulled my MacBook into my lap and did the sensible thing—I Googled my symptoms.
After only a quick perusal, it was clear.
I was going to die a long, painful death.
As with most of the medical information on the internet, it went straight to the direst conclusion. Even as I knew that reading all of this wasn’t going to make me feel any better, I couldn’t seem to stop. I devoured the medical advice, read every story out there about women who were currently anorexic and unable to conceive, and women who had been ten years healthy and still unable to conceive. Then I tipped forward into a deep dive, reading everything I could about what it would be like to be pregnant after having an eating disorder and how all the anxiety could come back when the body started to gain weight. Worse yet, the mind knew it was irrational to have these fears of gaining weight when the women believed they should only be concentrating on the health of the baby. But if I’d learned anything, anorexia was a hundred percent mental. It didn’t matter if a woman wasn’t supposed to think of her weight during pregnancy. It only mattered that she did.
By the end of it, I felt like a wrung-out towel.
My emotions were leaking out of me and onto the floor. My pain a constant knife through my stomach. My eyes blurry with unshed tears.
This couldn’t be happening.
Anxiety at its peek, I stumbled into my bedroom, shucked all of my clothes onto the floor, and stared at myself in the mirror, pinching the small pockets of fat on my hips and waist and thighs. I wasn’t like before. I wasn’t.
There was nothing wrong with me. I was just working out. I was still eating. In fact, I was working with a nutritionist now. She’d helped me figure out exactly what foods to eat to power my body through my training. This was healthy. Everyone had said so.
With a sigh, I stepped on the scale like I did every single morning. I looked at the number and frowned. I got back off and then did it again. Same number. See, I wasn’t going crazy. That was a healthy weight. I was still within the BMI. On the low side, but not in the underweight section. I’d been way in the underweight section when I had to be hospitalized. Way below.
This was… this was fine.
Fine.
My fingers fumbled for the shower, and I let it rain down on me, turning my skin pink. A hiccup escaped my lips, and I sank onto the tiled floor. I curled my legs into my chest, wrapping my arms around them.
Then I let go.
My chest heaved as I sobbed. All of my fear and anger and waves and waves of distress came out in that cry session. My eyes ached. I felt like I couldn’t get enough air in. Still, I couldn’t stop.
I didn’t want to look at why this hurt me so much. I knew why, but looking at it would make it a reality. I just needed to stay here in this shower until it was gone. Until all of it was gone.
I didn’t know how long I’d stayed in there. But at some point, I got out, put on an oversize T-shirt, and cried myself to sleep.
I woke to a hand touching my shoulder. Who the hell was here?
“Katherine, are you okay?” Lark asked.
I saw the concern on her face. I tried to reach back in my mind to find out why she was here. Had we had plans? My brain wouldn’t go back far enough to figure it out.
“Hey,” I whispered.
Lark settled onto the bed. “Your eyes are swollen and bloodshot. Have you been crying?”
I slowly sat up and brushed my hair back out of my face. “Yeah,” I whispered. “What are you doing here?”
“We were supposed to do dinner, remember?” Lark asked, alarm on her face. “What happened? Did you and Camden get in another fight?”
“Oh, right, dinner. Sorry.” Now that she’d mentioned it, it came back. “No, I haven’t seen Camden since Puerto Rico.”
“You’re worrying me, Ren,” Lark said gently.
“Because of this?”
“Yes, but before that. You’re not eating enough. You’re losing weight like it’s your job. You aren’t… happy. I mean, before, you always hid your happiness behind your bravado. But now, you’re not even hiding. I don’t like this. I don’t want to find you passed out in your room when you’d said you’d meet me. It scares me.”
“I don’t mean to scare you,” I told her. I looked down at my fresh manicure and back up. “I saw a friend of mine at the hospital when I was there for the charity.”
“Oh no, were they sick?”
“No.” Then I considered it. “Also, yes. She was a girl that I went to therapy with when I was hospitalized after high school. She started this group for… women who are infertile.”
Lark listened intently. I kept waiting for her to make a judgment. For her to jump to the same conclusion as I had. But she said nothing. Just let me speak.
I took a deep breath. “She thought that was why I was there. Because a large percentage of women who had to be hospitalized for anorexia… can’t have children.”
“How heartbreaking,” Lark whispered.
She didn’t ask the question, but I saw it in her eyes.
“And I don’t know if I can,” I said softly.
She put her hand on mine. “Are you trying to have a baby?”
“No,” I said automatically. Then I ran a hand down my face, completely devoid of makeup. Not an ounce of armor up against the questions I had to answer to my best friend. “But… maybe.”
“Well, I don’t know if you’re infertile, but I think maybe you should talk to Camden about this.”
“No!” I shook my head. “No way. I am not talking to Camden about this.”
She sighed in exasperation. “Why not? If you’re trying to have a kid, shouldn’t he know about potential setbacks? You could go to the doctor together. You don’t even know if it’s the case. You’re just worst-case-scenario-ing the situation. And even if you are, if this is what you want, there are treatments you could try before giving up.”
“I can’t tell him.”
“Katherine…”
“It was part of the contract,” I rushe
d out.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I… I got his money. He got me… and a baby. He wanted to start trying a while ago, and I kept putting it off. We were still arguing. I wasn’t ready. And now—” I choked back a sob. “Now, what if I can’t have one? Does that null the contract? Would he do that?”
Lark pulled me against her, wrapping her arms around my shoulders. “I don’t know what he would do, but I do know that it’s going to be okay. No matter what happens, it is going to be okay. You have me. You have crew. You do not have to go through any of this alone, Katherine.”
Another tear fell down my cheek as I sat with my best friend. “Thank you.”
“Of course. I’m always here for you. If you don’t want to tell Camden, I can go to the doctor with you. There are fertility tests. I’m sure we can figure something out.”
“I don’t… I don’t trust any doctors. Not enough for it to not get back to him.”
Lark sighed. “Seriously?”
I bit my lip. “Think about what he’s capable of, Lark. He had Thomas’s gambling ring raided. He set the whole thing up. He got English’s old boss arrested by releasing footage from within the hotel in LA. He’s ruthless.”
“He did all of that to protect the people he cares about though.”
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “But do you think that he wouldn’t find out I went to the doctor? That he wouldn’t find out what I went for? Even with all the legal restrictions?”
Lark rubbed my shoulder and then slowly shook her head. “I think Camden gets whatever he wants.”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Lark tapped her lip twice. “What about Whitley?”
“She’s a plastic surgeon.”
“Exactly. He’d never give a second look to you going to see her. But she went to medical school. She’s brilliant. I’m sure she can get tests ordered for you. You can trust her.”
My heart leaped at the thought. I had never considered that. Camden would never suspect a thing if I went to see Whitley. She was my friend. Plus, I’d had enough work done that going to see a plastic surgeon was more run-of-the-mill than a fertility doctor.