The Last Goodbye

by Sarah Mayberry

  “Where are you?” Ally asked.

  She’d overhead enough of the conversation to know what Tyler and his brother had told the doctor. If Bob became critical, they’d agreed it was kindest to let him go.

  “We’re passing the turnoff for Macedon,” Jon said.

  Which meant they were only half an hour away.

  “We’ll see you soon.” She slid her phone into her bag. She’d seen a coffee machine in the hallway. Something warm would be welcome right now.

  She was taking her first sip when the oncologist returned. “Bob’s awake, if you’d like to see him.”

  “Oh. Yes,” she said, abandoning her cup on the nearest flat surface.

  She followed the oncologist into the busy emergency department, stepping under his arm as he held back the curtains around one of the cubicles for her.

  Bob lay flat on the bed, his bare chest covered with leads. Oxygen prongs pinched his nostrils and a monitor tracked his heart rate with audible beeps. She moved to his bedside and touched his arm and his eyes opened. It took him a moment to focus on her and she guessed they’d given him some sort of pain relief.

  “Bob. It’s Ally,” she said.

  Bob closed his eyes again. “Ally. You’re a good girl,” he said weakly.

  She tried to think of something to say, something comforting that wouldn’t require an outright lie.

  “Tyler and Jon are on their way. They’ll be here any minute.”

  Bob’s hand moved on the bed. She reached for it and he gripped her fingers with surprising strength. He opened his eyes and looked at her.

  “Don’t want to die.” He sounded frightened, like a child. Ally swallowed a lump of emotion. She didn’t know what to say to him. They both knew he was dying. That if this wasn’t the end, it was damn close to it.

  She glanced surreptitiously at her watch, willing Tyler to arrive. Only ten minutes had passed since she’d ended the call, which meant they were still at least twenty minutes away.

  “Thought the cancer would get me. But my bloody ticker gave out.” He closed his eyes again and his grip slackened on her hand.

  The monitor made a different sort of beep and Ally’s gaze flashed to it. A series of uneven rhythms spiked on the screen. She glanced over her shoulder fearfully.

  “Help! I think something’s happening.”

  The curtain whipped back and two nurses and a doctor rushed in as Bob’s monitor sounded an alarm.

  “We need you to wait outside, please,” one of the nurses said and Ally was suddenly on the other side of the barrier.

  She stood there, arms wrapped around herself, listening to the hospital staff talking shorthand to one another for what felt like a long time. The alarm kept up a continuous whine.

  Then, suddenly, there was silence.

  Ally pressed her fingers to her mouth. A tear slid down her cheek. A few minutes later, one of the nurses slipped through the curtains.

  “I’m sorry,” she said simply.

  Ally nodded, unable to speak for the moment.

  “Would you like to sit with him?”

  “Yes.” Ally choked on the word.

  It seemed wrong that Bob should be left on his own so soon. And Tyler and Jon would want to see him when they arrived.

  “I need to make a call first,” she said, her heart heavy.

  “You’ll have to go out to the waiting area to do that, I’m afraid.”

  Ally made her way out of the emergency department, pulling her phone from her bag. She found a quiet corner and dialed Tyler’s number.

  “Ally.” It was Jon again.

  She took a shuddering breath, forcing the words out. “I’m really sorry. Bob had another attack. He’s gone.”

  A moment of silence. She could hear Tyler’s brother breathing on the other end of the line.

  “He’s gone,” Jon repeated, and she knew he was talking to Tyler and not to her.

  The sound of fumbling, then Tyler’s voice came down the line.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She closed her eyes. Only Tyler could ask that five seconds after he’d learned his father had died.

  “I’m fine. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay. We’re ten minutes away. Hang in there, okay?”

  She returned to Bob’s cubicle to wait for his sons to arrive. They’d removed the prongs from his nose and the leads from his chest, and the heart monitor was now blank and silent. His arms were by his sides, resting on the bed.

  Ally sat beside him and took one of his hands in hers and waited.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE PICK-UP HAD BARELY stopped before Jon was out and racing across the parking lot toward the emergency entrance of the hospital. Tyler followed more slowly, understanding his brother’s misplaced urgency. He, too, felt the need to make haste, in case there had been some kind of mistake, a last-minute reprieve.

  There wouldn’t be, of course. His father was dead. And it wasn’t as though seeing him one last time would change anything. Everything that was ever going to be said between them had been said. Tyler knew that in his bones.

  Jon had no such certainty, though. He’d flown halfway around the world and arrived twenty minutes too late. He hadn’t said a word after Ally’s phone call, but Tyler had felt the tension radiating off him in waves.

  He’d been shocked by his brother’s appearance when Jon had exited customs at the airport. His brother was unshaven, his eyes bloodshot. Understandable, perhaps, after a long flight, but he was also very lean, as though he’d lost a lot of weight recently. He looked like a man on the edge, a man in crisis.

  Ally was hovering outside a closed cubicle when he arrived in the emergency department.

  “Tyler,” she said, opening her arms.

  He walked into her embrace and held her close, inhaling the smell of her, feeling the warmth of her cheek against his own.

  She sniffed and he pulled back a little so he could look into her face.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Stop asking me that. He’s your father. How are you?”

  He glanced toward the curtain. “I’m okay.”

  She studied him, a small frown pleating her forehead. “I’m so sorry you weren’t here.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She frowned again but didn’t say anything. He nodded toward the curtain.

  “Is Jon in there?”

  “Yes. I figured he’d probably want some privacy…”

  Typical Ally, always thinking of others, always doing the right thing. He pressed a kiss to her forehead, then he released her and turned toward the cubicle.

  “I’ll wait here,” Ally said.

  Jon was standing near the head of the bed, arms crossed tightly over his chest, hands buried beneath his armpits. He was frowning fiercely as he stared at their father’s body, his lips pressed into a tight, thin line as he fought to suppress strong emotion.

  Tyler stopped beside him, taking in his father’s stillness, the gray cast to his skin, the sunken boniness of his face. The cancer had stripped more weight from him in the past weeks, despite the fact that Tyler had been doing his best to provide hearty, nutritious meals.

  Beside him, Jon made a choked sound.

  “I know you probably had some things you wanted to say to him. Things you wanted to hear from him,” Tyler said, carefully not looking at his brother. “If it’s any consolation, even if we’d gotten here in time, he wouldn’t have said anything. I don’t think he could.”

  “He was an old prick. A sadist. He—” Jon used his forearm to take a swipe at his eyes.

  “Mate.” Tyler could feel his brother’s anguish and fury, all the unresolved feelings clamoring for out. He laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder.

  Jon’s face twisted as his emotions got the better of him, then he jerked away from Tyler’s touch and pushed past him, disappearing through the curtain in a flurry of fabric.

  Tyler let him go. He was willing to bet his brother had ne
ver cried in front of anyone in his life.

  He returned his attention to the bed. A strand of his father’s hair was sticking up and Tyler reached out to smooth it into place. He let his hand rest on his father’s skull, aware that a few short weeks ago, the thought of touching his father with anything approaching gentleness would have been unimaginable to him. Proximity had burned out most of Tyler’s anger, and Ally had done the rest. Her patience and understanding and love.

  He studied his father’s face one last time. For good or for ill, the man who had once lived in this body had been the biggest influence in his life. He’d shaped Tyler in a thousand different ways. He’d been cruel, violent, selfish. And he’d also been scared and small and isolated.

  Not much of a life, when it came down to it.

  “Rest in peace,” he said quietly.

  He turned away from the bed. There would be arrangements to make, papers to sign.

  His father was dead. It was over. Finally.

  SIX HOURS LATER, TYLER made the short walk from his father’s house to Ally’s. He and Jon had been busy making arrangements all afternoon. Ally had quietly bowed out after lunch, leaving the two of them to work through it together. He knew what she was doing: giving them room to become the kind of brothers she thought they could be.

  It was a nice idea, but there was something closed off and hard about the man his brother had become. It would take a hell of a lot to break through all those barriers.

  He could hear Ally clattering around in the kitchen when he entered.

  “Hi,” she called out. “I bought some beer. I figured you guys might need a drink.”

  Tyler stopped in the kitchen doorway. Ally was standing at the counter wearing her Shrek pajama pants tossing a salad, and he could see she’d made kebabs for dinner.

  “Jon’s not coming.”

  Her face creased with concern. “What’s he going to do for dinner?”

  “He’ll probably get hammered and pass out.”

  “You Adamson men. Would it kill you to talk once in a while?”

  “I talk.”

  “Sometimes.”

  He moved closer and hooked his finger into the waistband of her pajamas. “What do you want to talk about?” He tugged her closer.

  She came willingly into his arms but her eyes were worried as she looked at him.

  “I know you must be feeling cheated. You came here and put your life on hold so you could get some kind of closure with your father—and he died before you could clear the air.”

  Tyler caught her earlobe between his thumb and forefinger, caressing it lightly. She was so soft, every part of her warm and welcoming.

  “We were never going to clear the air.”

  “I know he blanked you that time you fought, but I thought that once he’d had a chance to process the news he’d had this week that he’d change his mind.”

  He slid his hand around to the back of her neck, shaping his hand to her nape. “No.”

  “You sound so certain.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to tell you, but I found him sitting on the back steps this morning before I left for the airport.”

  “Really? What was he doing?”

  “Waiting for the sun to come up, maybe. I really don’t know. But he was so quiet. It was the most reflective I’ve ever seen him. So I asked him if there was anything he wanted to say, anything he wanted to get off his chest.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing.”

  He watched understanding dawn in Ally’s eyes. “God, he was such a stubborn old bastard.”

  “He was. Till the end.”

  She lay her head on his chest. He smoothed his hand over her hair.

  “I hate that you didn’t get what you needed from him.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it isn’t. The least he owed you was acknowledgment. To look you in the eye and own his own actions.”

  “I know what happened. I don’t need him to acknowledge it.”

  She lifted her head to look at him. “You’re really okay with this?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, I am. I came because I couldn’t live with myself if I did anything else. I did my best by him. I can live with that.”

  Her gaze searched his face, then she stood on tiptoes and pressed a kiss to his lips. “You’re a beautiful man, Tyler Adamson. I love you.”

  He stilled.

  Finally—finally—she’d said it. He’d been waiting, taking his cues from her, biding his time. But she’d said it. At last.

  “Does that mean you’re not going to take off when Wendy comes back next weekend?”

  There was a short pause before she answered. “I haven’t got another house-sitting job lined up yet.”

  It wasn’t really an answer, but he hadn’t really asked the question he wanted to ask, either, had he?

  “Ally. I love you. More than I ever thought it was possible to love anyone. Will you come to Melbourne with me, move into my place? Live with me?”

  He heard her suck in a quick breath, but he knew his question wasn’t a surprise. They’d been leading up to this since the moment they first met.

  She gripped her hands together as though she was bracing herself for something. His gut tightened. He had no idea what he was going to say or do if she said no.

  “Yes.”

  Relief made him stupid. He blinked. “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  He closed the distance that separated them and embraced her.

  “God, I love you, Ally Bishop.”

  “I love you, too.”

  He kissed her. Despite the heaviness of the day, he felt a little giddy. She’d said yes. After all his caution, all his concern about stifling her and overwhelming her, she’d said yes.

  “Let’s go to bed,” he said.

  She glanced toward the counter. “What about dinner?”

  “It can wait.”

  He waited while she stowed the salad in the fridge, then he pressed her against the wall and kissed her until she was pliant and breathless. They barely made it to the bedroom. He peppered her body with kisses, telling her he loved her, how much she meant to him. All the things he’d been holding inside for too long.

  If today had taught him anything, it was the value of speaking and sharing and connecting.

  Afterward, she dozed with her head on his chest. He stroked her arm, mentally making space for her in his closet, clearing out the spare room, rearranging the house so that she could make it her own.

  Much easier to do that than to think about that small, telling moment when she’d clasped her hands together and braced herself before giving him her answer. As though she was forcing herself to the point.

  He knew she had issues around settling. Hell, until he’d given her the table, she hadn’t owned a single stick of furniture. She saw herself as a born nomad, a dyed-in-the-wool gypsy. But things were good between them. The past few weeks had proved that beyond a doubt. And she loved him. Surely that would be enough.

  They would make it work. Somehow. He wasn’t giving her up. Not when it had taken him thirty-seven years to find her.

  TEN DAYS LATER, ALLY did one last quick survey of Wendy’s house.

  There was probably something she was forgetting. Normally when she house-sat she was very disciplined about where she left her things. This time, she’d gotten sloppy. She’d infiltrated every room of the house, and no doubt her friend would be finding traces of Ally’s presence for months to come.

  “I can’t see anything obvious,” she finally said.

  Wendy looked up from where she was scratching Mr. Whiskers’s belly.

  “I can forward anything to you. Or come visit. I’m in Melbourne all the time.”

  Ally nodded. There was a tight feeling in her chest and she told herself she was simply being sentimental. A lot of good things had happened during the three months she’d lived here. It was only natural that she’d be sad about leaving.


  Except the feeling in her chest didn’t feel like sadness. It felt more like anxiety. Verging on panic.

  Stop being such a drama queen. You want this. You love Tyler. There’s nothing to freak out over.

  She knew it was true, but she was still incredibly wary about moving into Tyler’s home. When he’d asked her, she’d known that they’d reached a point of no return. The elephant had finally been named, and Tyler was asking her to make a decision about her future. Their future.

  In all honesty, she’d expected it to be harder than it had been. But as she’d stood there looking at him, his declaration ringing in her ears, she’d tried to imagine life without him, all the mornings she’d have to wake up without him beside her if she stuck to the promise she’d made to herself five years ago and walked away.

  It had been impossible. Literally unimaginable. So she’d said yes, and it had been both easier and harder than she’d thought. Easier, because she loved Tyler desperately, and harder because she’d immediately felt the burden of what she’d committed to.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want to live with Tyler. She did. More than anything she wanted to move in with him and started weaving the strands of her life with his. It was simply that she’d been here before. Not this exact same place, true—because she’d never felt as connected as she felt with Tyler—but close enough. She’d made promises. Put down roots. And then she’d started to get itchy feet and the walls had closed in and she’d had to get out of there—but not before she’d hurt someone. Daniel in London, Jacob in L.A., Bailey in Sydney.

  It will be different this time. Tyler is different. He’s the one. The man who will make staying in one spot doable. Bearable.

  God, she hoped so. With every fiber of her being.

  “I still can’t believe Bob’s gone. And so quickly,” Wendy said, pushing herself to her feet. “I was away for only twelve weeks.”

  “The world can change in twelve weeks.”