by Claire Adams
“For the sake of chivalry, I want to clarify: I never meant for this to be about just sleeping together,” Eric said seriously. “I wouldn't do that to you.” He paused. “I want something more than casual. I just want to do it on our terms, without the whole town butting in.”
“So we need to figure out a way to make that work,” I said thoughtfully, already trying to come up with a solution. My heart was singing at the thought that he might want an actual relationship with me. I only hoped we could manage it.
“We need to find a way to make that work,” Eric agreed. “Easier said than done, but maybe if we set up all our dates when I stop by the daycare anyway, and then we both drive separately to where it is? I don't want it to feel like we're sneaking around, but just for now, I want to keep things quiet if we can.”
“All our dates?” I asked, feeling warmth blossom inside me.
Eric pulled me closer, kissing my hair. “All our dates,” he affirmed. “I know a certain Italian restaurant that you seem to like, and there's a Thai food place that I've wanted to take you to as well.”
I hummed a response and then rolled away. “For now, I guess you have to get back to Emma, though?”
“Yeah,” Eric sighed. He brushed my hair back, tucking it behind my ear. “I'll see you bright and early on Monday morning, though. Maybe I'll bring donuts, to make up for barging in here.”
I grinned. “Well, the sex in the front hall more than made up for your jealousy, but I wouldn't say no to donuts!”
Eric grinned as well and leaned in to give me a last, chaste kiss before he started putting his clothes on.
I closed the door behind him when he left and leaned back against it, wondering if this really could work out between us.
Chapter Twenty-One
Eric
I was in the middle of an appointment on Monday afternoon when my cell phone rang. I frowned, planning to ignore the thing. I could give them a call back afterward. But as soon as the phone quit ringing, it started up again. I glanced at Mrs. Allbright as I finished up the prescription that I was writing for her. “So you'll need to take two of these twice a day until they run out,” I instructed her. “But they'll print those instructions on the bottle when you go to fill the prescription. Let me know if you have any problems or if your symptoms get worse.”
Mrs. Allbright looked doubtfully toward my bag, where my phone had started ringing for the third time. “Aren't you going to answer that, dear?”
“Is it all right if I do?” I asked.
“It sounds like it must be important,” she said.
I nodded and grabbed my phone, stepping out onto the back porch to answer, giving me a little privacy. “Hello?”
“Eric! Eric, thank God. It's my mother. I don't know what's wrong with her or why she hasn't called 911, but she called me and said she can barely breathe and that she has severe pain in her chest. I don't know what's wrong, but I can't go over there right now because I have the kids.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “Olivia, I need you to take a deep breath for me, okay? In and out, nice and easy. Where is she?”
“At her house,” Olivia sobbed. “She's at her house, and Eric, I don't know what's wrong. It's so unlike her to complain about anything; it must be really serious.”
“I'm on my way over there now,” I promised. “I'll keep you updated. For now, just stay where you are. I'm sure everything is fine; we'll just do a couple of tests to make sure.”
The truth was, I wasn't sure that everything was fine. But worrying would only make Olivia panic even worse.
I hung up the phone and headed back inside, grabbing my things. “I've received an emergency call. I have to go,” I told Mrs. Allbright. “You can pay me later for the visit.”
“All right, go!” she said, waving her hands at me.
I ran over to Jeannie's house, bounding up the front steps in a single leap. Fortunately, the front door was unlocked, and I tore inside. “Jeannie?” I called, running from room to room. I skidded to a halt outside the bedroom, panting slightly.
Jeannie was laying back on her bed, her breath rattling from her lips. She coughed lightly. “Good to see you, doctor,” she panted.
“What seems to be bothering you?” I asked, putting on my professional voice as I strode into the room. “Olivia said your lungs were hurting you and that it was difficult to breathe?”
Jeannie nodded but didn't respond further.
Her breaths were coming irregularly, I realized, and I started to do a full examination, or as full of one as I could do here. I strapped a breathing mask over her face, but it didn't seem to help as much as I would have liked.
I frowned, feeling grim. I had a feeling I knew exactly what the issue was, and if I was correct, it wasn't a good sign. “Jeannie, I need you to come with me to Kingsfield to go to the hospital,” I told her as gently as I could. The woman's eyes widened, and I could tell that she was scared. I hurried to soothe her. “I just want to have some X-rays taken of your lungs,” I told her. “Just to see if we can figure out what's causing your pain.”
Jeannie's face clouded, and I thought for a second that she was going to argue. But she must have been in a decent amount of pain because, eventually, she nodded and let me help her up from the bed. I wondered if we would be better off taking an ambulance, but she was able to walk under most of her weight, although her breaths were still uneven and rattled.
Besides, an ambulance wasn't going to be able to help her more than I could. I had a feeling that the problem was that she had tumors growing in her lungs. Only a CT scan could tell; we would be able to see the vessels of the tumors and be able to go from there.
I swallowed hard, wishing that it hadn't come to this. Maybe if I'd been a little more insistent about the chemo treatments, we could have avoided this. Or at least delayed it, giving Olivia a little more time with her mother.
I drove too fast on the way to the hospital, but fortunately, I wasn't pulled over. I used my connections to get Jeannie in immediately for the X-rays, doing my best to fill out her paperwork based on the information I already had in her file, which fortunately had been in my doctor's bag since I'd been planning on having another talk with Olivia soon anyway.
I stood up as one of the doctors made his way over to me. “Dr. Halsey, good to see you,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand.
“I wish I had better news for you,” Halsey said grimly. “It's exactly what you suspected: the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes, and the tumors in her lungs are growing. Pretty soon, they'll be large enough that she won't be able to breathe properly.”
I closed my eyes and pressed my fingertips against my eyelids. “All right,” I said. “What do you suggest we do? Chemotherapy?” Halsey was one of the leading oncologists in the state; if anyone was going to be able to come up with a solution, it was him.
Unfortunately, he looked grim. “There's not much that we can do at this stage, Eric,” he said quietly. “Even with chemo, the chances are slim to none that she'll survive for much longer.”
I winced. “Could we surgically remove the tumors?” I asked, even though I knew that wasn't a viable option at this stage.
Sure enough, Halsey sighed. “We could try to remove them,” he said. “There's a chance that could make things worse for her body because it would have to fight off possible infection as well as the cancer. But even if we were successful in removing them, I'm afraid the cancer is in her blood at this point. Nothing is stopping it from coming back or spreading. It would only be a matter of time before we have to face the high likelihood of death again.”
I sighed. “I know,” I admitted. “I just hoped there was something else that we could do.”
Halsey gave me a strange look. “This isn't the first patient that you've lost,” he said slowly. “Why are you so fixated on this one?”
I grimaced. “I lost my wife to cancer a couple of years ago,” I admitted. “And Jeannie is the mother of my…of a good friend of
mine.” I stopped just short of calling Olivia my girlfriend. We might have agreed that we were going to keep dating, albeit in secret, but I still remembered her insistence on not labeling this, on not putting undue stress on the relationship.
“I'm sorry to hear that,” Halsey said sincerely, reaching out to squeeze my shoulder. He paused. “Where is her daughter?” she asked. “Her mother's been asking.”
“Olivia runs a daycare,” I told him. “She's got kids at the moment so she couldn't get away. That's why she sent me here with her mom.”
I knew that I needed to call Olivia, but I could only imagine how that conversation would go. Plus, I knew that she would have no choice but to bring Emma, but I didn't want Emma exposed to hospitals and death. She had been too young to remember everything that had happened when Emily had died, and I wanted to keep it that way. Keep her innocence, in a sense.
But we didn't have a choice; it wasn't like she could go back with Nana for the day.
Fortunately, Olivia made the decision before I even had a chance to call her. She burst through the doors of the hospital looking distressed but bravely staving off her tears. Emma came with her, clinging to the woman's hand, looking around in fascination.
“Hey,” I said, moving to intercept them.
Olivia gave me a brave smile and looked down at Emma. “Harlan went back home for the afternoon. Sorry to bring Emma here, but I had to see Mom.”
“I know,” I soothed. “Come here, let's see if Emma can stay with one of the nurses while you and I go in to see her.”
The nurse was more than happy to watch Emma, and Emma was more than happy to stay with her, once she was promised coloring pages, a sucker, and (if she was really good) a balloon. I breathed a sigh of relief, thankful that she'd chosen today of all days to cooperate.
“What's happening with Mom?” Olivia asked as we hurried away from the nurse's station. “She's all right, isn't she?”
I took a deep breath and pulled her into an empty room, closing the door behind us. “She's awake and aware, but she's not doing good,” I told Olivia. “The cancer has spread, and she's having a difficult time breathing. At this point, there's nothing else that we can do except make her comfortable.” I scowled, knowing that I shouldn't take my anger out on her, but I was frustrated. “You know, if the two of you hadn't ignored my warnings, we could have at least extended her life for a little while, if not managed to save her.”
Olivia stared at me, her mouth falling open. “Excuse me?” she asked.
“She's dying, Olivia. And soon. It didn't have to be this way. If you'd cared enough, you would have convinced her to take care of this when it first became an issue. And don't try to tell me you didn't know that it was this severe; you moved to Tamlin because you knew exactly how severe it was.”
Olivia was silent for a long moment, tears welling in her eyes. “You ass,” she finally whispered.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Olivia
I couldn't believe what I was hearing from Eric. My mother lay dying in a hospital bed, and he was blaming me for it? As though I hadn't done everything that I could.
“Maybe if you had done your job and convinced her that she needed treatment, we wouldn't be here!” I found myself shouting. “Rather than have me try to talk to her, with my utter lack of medical experience, maybe you should have found some way to convince her. I'm sure you have experience with stubborn patients. But you didn't even try!”
“As a doctor, I ultimately have to leave it up to the patient,” Eric snarled. “Which is what I did. I laid out all the facts, I told her how serious this was, and I even reminded her that it wasn't just herself that she'd be hurting if she didn't get the treatment. What else was I supposed to say to her? I don't know her the way that you do; you should have been able to find a way to reason with her.”
It was like a slap in the face; basically, what he was implying was that Mom didn't care enough about me to want to prolong her life. I knew that wasn't the case. I remembered what Mom had said about chemo ruining a person's quality of life. She just wanted to make sure that if she was alive, she was able to do everything that she wanted to do, rather than just hanging around as an empty husk, unable to work or garden or do any of the other things that she loved.
The fact that Eric would dare imply otherwise made me even more upset.
“Well, I can't force someone to receive treatment either, even if she is my mother,” I snapped. “I did my best to convince her, but, as you said, ultimately it was her decision.”
“You gave up too easily,” Eric said. “How many times did you even talk to her? You didn't want to have the conversation; you were perfectly happy just pretending that the cancer didn't exist, just like she was.”
“I tried, over and over again to talk with her. She didn’t want to deal with it.” I asked. “Again, I don't have any sort of medical background. I never had all the details on what was wrong with her, all the facts. I didn't know how far along we were or what might happen to her if she didn't get chemo, not in anything more than an abstract sense. What was I supposed to do?”
“You don't have to have a medical background to know that cancer often leads to death,” Eric said exasperatedly, rolling his eyes at me.
I was silent for a long moment, tears still streaming down my face. I wiped at them, but more just took their place. I didn't understand why we were fighting about this. I could understand if there was still that unresolved tension between us, but I had thought that we had solved that. I thought we were okay. I would have expected him to comfort me. That was why he had been the first person I'd called after Mom complained to me: not because Eric was her doctor but because Eric was my friend. Or so I had thought.
I didn't know where this mean and angry-spirited man had come from. I had never seen Eric like this before.
But it's not like I know him well, I realized. We'd been on a couple dates; that was all. If he'd just wanted to sleep with me, it would have been in his best interest to be nice on those dates. Look where it had got him. But maybe this was what he was really like.
I didn't want to believe it, but a part of me was increasingly sure that the kind, charming Eric that I'd previously thought I'd known had been just a façade. I swallowed hard and shook my head.
“I did the best I could,” I repeated, for my own benefit as well as his. “Apparently that wasn't good enough.”
Eric didn't say anything.
“Where is she?” I asked. “I can see her, can't I?”
“She's down this hall, room 118,” Eric told me. “She's been asking for you.”
“And there's nothing that we can do at this point?” I asked, hating the desperate note that crept into my voice. But this is where we were at at the moment. I was desperate to figure out some way to miraculously save her, even though apparently all hope was gone.
“The chemo can't help at this point; the cancer has advanced too much,” Eric said dully. “We could try to remove the tumors from her lungs, but it would be a risky operation and a risky recovery, and at this point, the cancer is already in her blood. There's nothing we can do.”
I folded in on myself, wishing stupidly that he had lied to me, that he had told me that there was something that we might be able to do. I had never felt so helpless in my life.
And I knew that part of the reason I was so angry with him, part of why I was so desperate to pass the blame onto him, was because I was guilty. He was right. I should have tried harder. I hadn't pushed like I knew that I should have.
But did he have to be so mean about it?
“I'm going to get Emma out of here,” Eric said. “I don't want her around the hospital. I'll try to find someone else to watch her this week if you want to stay here with your mom rather than running the daycare.”
“How long does she have?” I asked, even though I hated saying the words.
Eric was silent for a long moment. “Not long,” he finally said. “Could be weeks. Could be days.”
>
I dissolved into tears, but Eric didn't move to comfort me. Instead, he stared impassively at me for a long moment and then strode briskly from the room, leaving me there by myself.
By myself, with…
I put my hand over my stomach, remembering my unborn child. Our unborn child. Even if Mom managed to hang on for a few more months, she wasn't going to be around to meet her grandchild. I remembered how much she had always wanted to have grandchildren, and I felt an irrational surge of anger.
Why hadn't she gotten the chemotherapy when she knew that was the only thing that could slow down her cancer? Wasn't it the responsibility of a mother to do everything in her power to ensure that her child was happy? I didn't want to watch her die, not like this, and definitely not now.
And there was this argument with Eric. I felt suddenly uncertain about the child. I still hadn't told him about it, and I had to wonder what his reaction would be. Would he try to blame me for that as well? Would he be just as angry and upset and unreasonable?
I swallowed hard. I knew that I had to tell him sooner rather than later, but I had to wonder if he would even talk to me again, after this argument.
I leaned against the hospital bed for support, my knees feeling weak and my blood roaring in my ears. Suddenly, everything in my life seemed to be going wrong. It had been ever since I'd moved to Tamlin, and I had to wonder what I had done to piss off the universe in such a big way. A dying mother, an unsuccessful daycare, an unhappy non-relationship, and an unexpected pregnancy: could it get any worse than that?
I took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm myself down. I had to see Mom. I had to tell her I was sorry and apologize for not insisting that she get the treatment that she needed. I had to tell her about the baby, but I wasn't sure if I could. Maybe it would only stress her out, knowing that she wouldn't be here for the birth, knowing that I was about to become a single mother, just like she had been.
I took a few more deep breaths, but I couldn't seem to quit crying. Finally, I sunk to the floor, realizing I had no choice but to let it all out.