by Tina Michele
Between Sand and Stardust
Haven Thorne and Willa Bennette were childhood sweethearts who had it all—a partnership, a home, and a future planned out ahead of them—until Willa’s life was threatened by a silent killer and their relationship was torn apart. Heartbroken and alone, both women struggled to live without each other for the first time.
Years later, they both believe they’ve finally moved on and settled into their new lives. But it doesn’t take long for fate, chance, and Mother Nature to step in and mix things back up. Can true love withstand both time and distance in order to bring Haven and Willa back together, or are they now as different as the sand and stars—too far apart to be together once more?
Between Sand and Stardust
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Between Sand and Stardust
© 2018 By Tina Michele. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13:978-1-62639-941-9
This Electronic Book is published by
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, NY 12185
First Edition: January 2018
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editor: Cindy Cresap
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design: Sheri([email protected]) and Tina Michele
By the Author
Stealing Sunshine
In Every Cloud
Venus in Love
Between Sand and Stardust
Acknowledgments
First of all, thank you to my tribe. My merry band of misfits, and the renegades of the river. You are the magic that makes this book what it is. I told you I’d write about you all one day, and I kept my promise. All my love to Caitlyn, Chad, Chris, Colin, Garland, Gianna, Jen, Katie, Lyle, Matt, Nancy, Rebecca, and Stephanie.
Thank you to Epic Experience and Renaissance Adventure Guides for providing an environment of love and adventure for thrivers, survivors, and caregivers to “Live Beyond Cancer.” You changed my life.
As always, Cindy, this book would not be what it is without your keen eye and talent. Of course, thanks to BSB, Sandy, and Rad for understanding that sometimes life gets in the way of art.
Finally, this finished project would be less than it is without the help, guidance, and “show”manship of my dear friend Kim.
For my soul friends and caregiver companions, James, Wendy, and Shannon.
Chapter One
Willa Bennette surveyed the freshly turned field that was bordered by a mix of green cypress and pine trees. It was the last thing to check off her to-do list before leaving on this trip. She could smell the fresh soil as it began to warm under the midmorning sun, and it was a scent Willa could never get enough of. She stepped over the primitive border log that edged the field. It was no more than a foot high, yet Willa managed to catch the toe of her boot when she misjudged the height. She stumbled several steps forward into the soft dirt as she recovered her balance, but not without a zing of frustration.
As much as she tried to ignore it, or pretend it wasn’t happening, there was no denying that Willa’s vision was progressively getting worse, and it was now to the point that it was affecting her depth perception. Eventually, the sight in her right eye would blur, darken, and fade into complete darkness. Willa closed her bad eye and peered out over the field wondering how she was ever going to get used to the fact that one day she would be partially blind. She crouched down and took a handful of soil in her hand, then brought it to her face and closed both eyes. Willa inhaled the earthy scent of the land. Her land. The smells around her gave her a sense of peace and tranquility, and she could feel the tension in her muscles fade away. Feelings she once thought she’d never have again. Willa wondered if her other senses would heighten as her vision faded away. She let the dirt filter through her fingers and paused in the moment trying to slow the passage of time. She took a deep, satisfying breath and let it out slowly. It was times like this, when she was alone with nature, that she had no desire to be anywhere else. She stood, clapped the dust from her hands, and made her way back toward the house.
She had always dreamed of having her own farm. It was one of several dreams that she gave up the moment Dr. Carter sat her down and uttered the unexpected word, cancer. As soon as the word was spoken, Willa had set a plan into motion that would ensure those around her would be sheltered from the process and the outcome, good or bad. While the diagnosis and its aftermath had devastated Willa’s life in nearly every way, she had survived.
Willa never discussed the “C-word” with anyone, not even her brother and business partner, Kyle. He had no idea the effects that the chemotherapy and radiation had on her physically or emotionally, and he most certainly didn’t know that she was steadily going blind as a result of her treatment. Her treatment had no visible effects on her. There were no scars, no hair loss, and no uncontrollable nausea. All in all, the worst of it was the surgery to implant the radioactive plaque directly onto her eyeball over the tumor inside the eye. Then she spent five days in quarantine in the hospital wearing leaded safety glasses. She had no computer, no cell phone, and no visitors outside of the hospital staff.
Willa didn’t want sympathy or sad looks. She didn’t want anyone going out of their way or changing their life to help her, and she refused to have anyone treat her differently because of it. Yet, as much as she avoided discussing it with others, she had a constant reminder she could never escape. Willa had done what she needed to do each step of the way. She received the diagnosis, began treatment, and got scanned every six weeks. But even now she hadn’t truly processed everything that had happened over the last three years of her life, at least not in the way everyone else thought she should.
Until she began to lose her vision, she had been able to compartmentalize the events surrounding her illness. She tried to keep it separate from her life. If she didn’t, she was afraid that she would be too scared to move on for fear of it returning or spreading within her body. Willa couldn’t live like that. How could anyone live with a constant fear of death looming over them every moment of the day and night? It was bad enough she had such a reminder every four months when she went to Miami for her routine scans and the inescapable anxiety that accompanied them.
One of the ways Kyle thought she should deal with things was to attend a group camp in the Colorado Rockies. He had come to her a few months earlier with an acceptance letter from Valiant Adventures for her to attend a cancer survivor camp. She appreciated that he cared enough to submit an application on her behalf, but she was also annoyed by his audacity at taking it upon himself to sign her up for six days of misery in the mountains. How could commiserating with a group of cancer patients in the middle of nowhere be anyone’s idea of a good time? She had combated the disease and won, that’s all that had mattered to her.
Kyle heaved the duffel into the back of the black pickup. It landed with a booming thud. “What on earth do you have in this thing, Will?”
“I don’t know, everything. The list of crap was damn near two pages long.” Willa might have overcompensated and packed an extra t
his or that just in case. Her entire body was awhirl with anxiety and anticipation and not in a good way. She hadn’t slept at all the night before thinking about the coming days. When Kyle had come to her with this idea, she had no intention of actually going on this trip. That was until she had some time to think about it and go over the packet of materials they had included with her acceptance letter. The brochures and pamphlets were filled with images of smiling campers on horseback on a beautiful, historic ranch surrounded by whitewater rivers and mountain lakes. There wouldn’t be enough time to even think about cancer with all the activities that were planned for the week. And that, Willa was more than okay with. Even still, a part of her felt guilty leaving her brother to tend to their farm on his own. “I don’t have to go, Kyle. There are a ton of things we could be doing around here instead of—”
Though she was still a bit hesitant with the idea of spending a week with complete strangers, Willa was excited about her trip. It had been years since Willa had taken any time to step away from life. Truthfully, the last major adventure she’d been on was to Wyoming and the Grand Tetons with her ex-girlfriend, Haven. It had been their last trip as a couple and the most memorable time in her life. Less than a month after they returned, her world imploded, and Willa chose to make the most painful decision in her life. She left Haven. Without reason or explanation, Willa walked out on her, the life they had built, and the future they had planned together. As soon as the doctor uttered the word cancer, Willa vowed that she would not put Haven through the agony of seeing her suffer, becoming her caregiver, or God forbid, watching her die.
Her chest tightened and she tried to swallow around the lump in her throat known as guilt and regret as she remembered the painful months following her diagnosis and the devastating heartbreak she inflicted not only on Haven, but on herself as well. Her life had changed in such a short time. Willa still had days where she wondered what would’ve happened had she not made the decision she had. There was no use worrying about such things now. It had been three years since all that, and she wouldn’t be where she was had it not all gone down the way it had. The way she had arranged it.
“Enough, Will. You’re going. For once, take some time for yourself. You need it.”
Willa hopped into the rusty pickup, and the engine sputtered to life. She was going to cancer camp. The best she could hope for was a week of fun and adventure, trying new things, and doing as little talking about her cancer as possible. Although she knew that was almost as unlikely as Kyle making it a week without cutting off a finger doing something stupid.
Willa looked back toward the farm as they bumped down the gravel drive to the road and she felt her chest swell with pride. She could still hardly believe that what she was looking at was hers. Well, hers and Kyle’s. Three years earlier, every hope and dream she had seemed lost, either snatched from her or tossed away. But then came the day when she heard Dr. Carter tell her that the treatment had worked. However, with the good news came the bad. He warned her that due to its proximity to her retinal nerve it was possible that she could lose some or even all of the sight in that eye. He didn’t seem overly concerned until her first scan and vision test. The tumor had maintained its size, but they were already seeing a slight reduction in clarity of her vision. It seemed that she would in fact lose sight in her left eye. She didn’t feel the need to tell anyone, including Kyle. Willa never talked about her treatment or prognosis with him, and he knew her well enough never to ask.
With the tumor under control, Willa began to work toward gathering the pieces of her life back together. She had closed herself off from everyone, except for Kyle, and that was only due to his unyielding commitment to always be around. Even if she never told him, she was glad for his companionship. When Willa had the idea to move forward with her dream of buying a piece of land to start a farm, there was no question that she would want Kyle to be her partner. Besides Haven, he was the only person she could make it work with. She might not have been able to salvage the wreckage of her previous life from the choices she had made, and cancer might have taken everything else from her, but if she could make this venture work she would ask for nothing more from the time she had left on this earth.
As they got closer to the airport, Willa got more and more reluctant about getting on the flight. With these memories bombarding her, she started to feel uneasy about the trip. She wasn’t afraid of flying as much as she was uncomfortable with the unknown. Plus, she was leaving Kyle on his own to tend to her responsibilities. She had grown used to having very few people around her on a daily basis, and she wasn’t going to know a single person on this trip. Willa felt her stomach churn and her breathing quicken at the thought of having to talk about herself, about her cancer in front of a bunch of strangers. Hell, she hardly knew the person she had become over the last few years, and now she would have to talk about herself? She had a sudden desire to jump out of the moving truck and run in the opposite direction of the airport. She rubbed her temples, trying to ease the headache that was now threatening to take over her entire head. This was going to be a long week.
* * *
Haven Thorne closed her eyes and steeled herself before the reverend called her to the pulpit. It wasn’t the first time that she’d been called before the congregation and guests to express her deepest condolences for the loss of their friend. “Thank you all for being here to celebrate the life of our dear friend, Falsey Daniels. A beautiful soul whisked away from us by the bane that is cancer. So many times I have been asked why I choose to fight alongside these brave men and women as they battle whatever comes at them. My answer is simple, because I am one of them.” Haven finished her eulogy and dabbed the tears that clung to her lashes.
In what seemed like a lifetime ago, Haven had been a victim of cancer. She had been diagnosed when she was seventeen after a rapidly growing mass was discovered on her thyroid. Within months, what had started as a small lump had grown to the size of a golf ball. As a self-conscious teen in her senior year of high school, Haven had simply done what she could to hide the growth and pretend it would just go away on its own. It hadn’t.
“Haven, what is that?” Willa asked.
Haven covered the large lump at the base of throat. “It’s nothing. Just a knot.”
Willa grabbed Have’s hand and moved it out of the way to expose the knot on her neck. “This isn’t nothing, Haven. Do your parents know about this?” Willa’s face flushed white.
That was all it had taken before all hell broke loose in her life. The next few weeks were a buzz with doctor visits, waiting, biopsies, waiting, CT scan, bone scans, blood tests, always followed by more waiting. She could still recall the fear in everyone’s eyes when the results determined that it was in fact cancer. She had cancer. How could this be happening? She was only seventeen.
The whole time, Willa had never left her side. She was there with her on the day of her surgery, holding her hand and talking about everything they still had yet to do in their lives.
“We could take a gap year and backpack across Europe. Or we could move out to Colorado and work as ranch hands for minimum wage.” Willa did whatever she could to keep Haven’s mind on the future.
“You’ve been my rock through all of this.” She knew that there wasn’t anyone else she wanted to spend her future with. “I love you, Willa.” Somewhere in the middle of the worst days of her life, she had fallen in love with her best friend. The last thing she remembered before they took her to the operating room were the soft, warm lips pressed against hers.
In the end, Haven had been lucky. The tumor was centralized to her thyroid, and she was able to avoid both chemotherapy and radiation. Of course, she was now forced to take daily medications to compensate for hormones her body could no longer produce. For years, it had become the only reminder of her cancer battle, and in her mind, she got off far easier than so many others.
Haven returned to her seat and sat next to Bianca Nathan and let her own hand be held in Bianca’
s lap. She wasn’t always opposed to public displays of affection. Sometimes, Haven felt that Bianca’s constant adorations and declarations were a bit over the top, but she always knew when Haven needed a little external support, whether it was a hand or a hug, or even a boost of confidence when she was feeling low on self-esteem. Their relationship was still quite new to Haven, both personally and professionally. She was just getting used to the directions her life was taking, but she was thankful to have someone like Bianca supporting her as she explored this life she was making for herself.
Her road out to Colorado was an interesting one. For Haven, her cancer had always been just a blip on the radar. Save for her anxiety disorder, it wasn’t an issue that came up often or affected her in any significant way. As strange as it was, most of the time she actually forgot that she’d had it unless some stranger noticed the scar on her throat and asked her about it. Which, awkwardly enough, was how she eventually found herself on a plane to Colorado to attend Valiant Adventures. As fate would have it, she met a fellow cancer survivor, Caitlyn, when she began dating one of her friends back home. It was her experience with melanoma that led her to Valiant as a means of meeting others dealing with cancer and learning how to keep living in spite of it. While Haven had thought she was doing a fine job of living beyond cancer, she had no idea just how much it had truly affected the decisions she made every day. Caitlyn helped her see that no cancer is easy, and that Haven still found herself obsessing over every odd bump or pain wondering if it might be the disease making its return to her life.