My ignorance had given me extra pocket money, but at what price?
John put his head in his hands, elbows wedged on his knees.
I wanted to pat his back and assure him that whatever conclusions his doctor was cooking were wrong. I wanted to say I’d worn masks and gloves and knew what the hell I was dealing with.
But the lies solidified on my tongue and terror turned into stones inside me.
No one spoke.
All of us dealing with ramifications, deep in separate thought. Shakes infected me the more I fell into the pit of despair.
“Right then.” The doctor shattered the taut silence, scribbling more notes. Spinning in his chair, he faced the computer and started typing with two fingers. “There are numerous explanations for your symptoms, so we’re not going to worry just yet. You’re young and fit, which is always a good thing.” He threw me a look, stabbing his fingers on the keys. The process was laborious and not at all smooth like Della’s typing.
“However, I’ve dealt with a lot of claimants over the years and learned that jumping to conclusions can sometimes be a good thing.” His eyes burned into me. “Sometimes, they can save a life.”
Hitting enter, a printer whirred into action.
Grabbing the document, he signed it then passed it to me. “You need to go to the hospital. I’ve referred you for blood tests, X-rays, and possibly a CT scan.”
“What? Why?” The stones inside me manifested into rocks, weighing me down, pushing a painful cough from my lips.
“I’m not wasting time testing for bacterial infections or immune deficiencies. I’ve dealt with too many cases not to see the warning signs. Once I know the answer to this question, then we’ll look at other possibilities.”
“The answer to what question?” John asked, his voice tight, face harrowed.
“The warning signs of what?” I blurted at the same time.
Giving us both a grave look, the doctor answered us in one go, announcing the nature of my death. “Mesothelioma.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
DELLA
* * * * * *
2031
HE NEVER TOLD me.
After decades together, unbreakable trust, and a never ending connection, he didn’t tell me.
He
didn’t
tell
me.
Just writing those words breaks my heart into smithereens.
It breaks me in so many ways. It makes me sob, rage, beg, curse, and scream.
For so long now, I’ve shown you how pedantically Ren protected me all my life. Revealed how he would do anything for me, in any circumstance, time, or place.
I’ve painted his picture over and over, showing you exactly what sort of man he was, and how his greatest quality was also his biggest flaw.
He was selfless and careful and kind.
And in this…he was no different.
He decided to carry the burden alone.
I hated him for that.
I cursed him every day for lying.
I never knew what he went through that night.
How John drove him straight to the hospital, signed with his insurance, and sat with Ren for hours, waiting for the tests.
All I knew at the time was Cassie received a phone call as we were on our way back from spending the afternoon with Chip and Nina, saying they’d gone into town for a beer and dinner.
It was a tad unusual, but John had treated Ren to a meal out—just the two of them— before, so I wasn’t overly concerned.
I wasn’t concerned when Ren came home later than normal and tossed his jeans into the wash straight away.
I wasn’t concerned when he ran more ‘errands’ with John a few days later, leaving Cassie and me sketching out stables and arena concepts for her horse business.
I wasn’t even concerned when the phone rang for Ren and he took it alone in the farmhouse, returning a little while later subdued and quiet but still willing to kiss and laugh when I poked him to liveliness.
All that time.
All those minutes and hours and days.
I didn’t know.
How
did
I
not
know?
How did I not see?
I loved him past sanity.
I loved him more than anything else in the world, so…how?
CHAPTER FIFTY
REN
* * * * * *
2021
I WAS SICK.
Sick of lying.
Of hiding.
Of holding Della late at night, listening to her soft breathing, all while fighting the terror that’d set up home inside me.
The lies I’d told the past few months.
Fuck.
The lies I’d told over and over again.
I wished I could take them all back.
I wished I could kill my mother for ever selling me to a place that had tried to kill me when I was young and didn’t succeed until I was older.
I’d run with Della, so full of hope and boldness for life. I’d protected her by any means necessary. I’d sacrificed everything for her. I’d given her my heart and soul.
Yet…I couldn’t protect her from this.
I’d believed I was just like any ten-year-old kid the day I’d escaped from hell.
I’d fallen in love and grown up and planned a future with the woman I wanted.
And the entire time we’d plotted course and travelled through time, I’d been a dead man walking.
I might have run from Mclary’s. I might still live and breathe and exist, but I’d died there.
I was a ghost.
Della had fallen in love with someone who was already dead….He just didn’t know it yet.
God, the pain.
The torment.
The undying yearn to somehow reverse the clock and forbid such tragedy from happening.
I thought I was prepared to die. I believed I would accept when my time came because I would’ve had an entire lifetime with Della by my side.
I wanted kids with her.
I wanted the privilege of growing old with her.
I wanted to marry her.
Now…that lifetime was no longer an option.
No one knew how long I had.
Statistics had been thrown around until I had to stop listening. I refused to let depression latch onto one answer while hope clung to another.
How fucking twisted that I got my wish?
I would die before her.
It was a guarantee now, not merely a possibility.
And I would die so much earlier than I wanted.
That was the worst part.
Lying in bed, warm and cocooned in the dark—that was when the aching, quaking grief found me. Tears would leak from my eyes as I squeezed them shut against the agony of what existed in our future.
I’d clutch a sleeping girl close, stifling my urge to cough, hating the curse in my lungs.
The tests had come back positive.
Stage one mesothelioma.
John had been there when I’d heard the news. When the phone fell from my hand and the doctor on the other end asked us to come see him for further information. When I’d heard words such as latency period, chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, I’d shut down.
I couldn’t help it.
I turned blank inside to prevent pure, undiluted rage from consuming me.
Rage at life.
Rage at injustice.
Rage at unfairness.
Rage at love itself.
Life, it seemed, had decided I’d loved too deeply and for long enough. I’d had Della for longer than most couples, and we were still so young.
But I was greedy.
I didn’t want to die.
I wanted more and more and more.
I wanted everything I would never have and it fucking tore me up inside that I couldn’t.
So, when doctors hemmed and hawed about my prognosis, I said nothing.
John cried.
I didn’t.
When treatment plans were discussed, John demanded all of it, any of it, immediately.
And I’d stared into silence and wondered.
How?
How would I ever tell Della?
How would I ever break her heart the way my own heart was breaking?
How could I protect her from all of this while ensuring she would be safe once I’d gone?
Being given that diagnosis was the start of a war between John and me.
He wanted to pay for surgery straight away.
I wouldn’t accept charity.
He wanted to hook me up to drips and lock me in the hospital.
I needed to be outside.
Both of us wanted a solution, but I refused to accept the money he had from Patricia’s life insurance, and I had no intention of letting Della see me frail and weak post-surgery.
John was willing to condemn me to a life of sickness if it meant extending that life by a few years.
But I had no intention of being bedridden.
I was incurable.
We both heard that truth.
And now, it was the hardest decision of my life to gamble on what option would give me most of what I wanted.
Rushing into it wasn’t going to happen.
I needed to think.
To plan.
To strategize.
For a month, we argued while I researched, and he rang every hospital in the country. Not having any money or insurance, my choices were slim.
But then, John’s doctor referred me to an oncologist who dealt with mesothelioma and agreed to see me for free, considering I was one of the younger patients to show symptoms, and I wasn’t on death’s door just yet.
I had time.
I had the potential to be studied.
I lied to Della once again, claiming I was inspecting a guy’s farm for new fence lines, and headed to the appointment on my own.
I didn’t want John there. I needed to do this alone. I wanted the luxury of showing my fear to a doctor rather than acting brave around a friend.
And that was how I found out two things that didn’t save my life but definitely gave me hope.
There were off-label trials for men like me. Two drugs that had shown success in later stages but had yet to have conclusive evidence in stage one.
Keytruda—an immunotherapy that was administered by intravenous injection for thirty minutes every three weeks, and a listeria-based vaccine called CRS-207 that had shown promise.
One was a passive immunotherapy and one was an active, meaning my already pre-loaded immune system that had adapted and grown with me would have help in fighting the cells that were slowly killing me and be taught to recognise those cells.
I liked the sound of that.
I enjoyed the thought of my body becoming its own weapon instead of its own enemy.
I nodded along as the doctor advised there were still side effects, but not nearly as many as chemo, and accepted the fine print. And besides, the side effects were almost identical to the symptoms I already had—coughing, breathlessness, and lack of appetite—that I didn’t care anyway.
Every three weeks was doable, and I could lie to Della about an hour trip away from home—either to the lumber mill for barn supplies or some other made-up excuse.
The oncologist suggested I think about it, but I knew I wanted to fight and fight hard, so I signed hundreds of waivers, put my life in his hands, and started the first round of treatment three days later.
I’d never been good with sharp things.
And needles?
Fuck, it was a nightmare.
Sitting in a low-ceilinged ward with dying people while chemicals flowed through my veins made claustrophobia press on me until my breathing turned shallow and my coughing became worse.
By the time it was over, I already dreaded the next appointment—glad I had twenty-one days to grow some balls to face it.
But at least I’d done something to give myself a chance. I hadn’t just curled up and accepted the inevitable like John believed I had. I wasn’t being a martyr by refusing to worry Della with this shit. This was my problem, and I would fix it.
Hopefully.
When I went home that night, I felt a little nauseous but overall fine, and I took Della to a diner, making sure I joked and acted perfectly normal.
Her eyes were sharper and attention closer, suspecting things but not sure what. But by the end of the meal, after seducing her with rich food and making her drunk with kisses, she slipped back into our trust and her wariness floated away.
That night, I made love to her with a passion bordering painful.
I refused to turn on the light, hoping she could feel me bruise her, love her, consume her, and always remember me as strong and alive.
Turned out, life was a slippery thing, but I grasped onto it with all my strength.
There was no way I was dying.
Not yet, at least.
I couldn’t—not until I had my ring on Della’s finger and her last name forever stitched to mine. And that was how a wet day in spring brought at least some answers to my prayers, along with a threat to my time-restrained freedom.
Martin Murray knocked off slushy snow from his boots and strode into the kitchen with a red nose from icy breezes. John had invited him onto his property with the taut wariness of a soldier being drafted for battle.
Ever since I’d been told what lived inside me, John had been overly protective of me.
Della sometimes raised an eyebrow at the way he layered my plate with vegetables and filled my palm with vitamins. He’d overstepped a few times, but I didn’t have the heart to tell the old man to back off.
He’d done so much for me.
The lawyer he’d arranged—in case I was still prosecuted for Della’s kidnapping—had now been given other duties, including drawing up my Will and Testament—leaving everything I had to Della, even though I had nothing of value—and arranging my funeral so it wasn’t yet another burden when I was gone.
Rain turned to snowflakes as we all sat at the well-used dining table in a fire-warmed house and prepared to find out what happened with the Mclary case.
Nerves danced down my spine. Worry that I might be thrown in jail filled my broken lungs, granting a rattling cough. What if the investigation had finished, and I’d still been found at fault?
Della sensed my tension, running a gentle hand over my lower back.
Never again would I take her touch for granted.
Never again would I be annoyed at her or be short-tempered or argue.
It was a struggle not to count each time she touched me, keeping tally of how many I could earn before I wasn’t there to earn more.
Shaking my head, I banished those thoughts as Martin cupped his hands around a cup of steaming coffee and looked at John as he lowered his big bulk into the chair at the head of the table.
“Thank you for seeing me.” Martin cleared his throat, his eyes catching mine, then Della’s.
Long ago, Della and I had sat here and been interrogated in a different way. I’d been coughing with pneumonia, and a five-year-old Della had tried to fight my battles. That had ended in a happy conclusion.
Would this?
“Why are you here?” I asked, not impolitely but with a reminder that the sooner this was over with, the better.
“I have news.” Martin reached to the briefcase by his chair leg and pulled out a file. “Here.” Skidding it across to us, he waited until I’d opened it and pulled out a page. It looked like gibberish full of police terminology, dates, reference numbers, and findings.
“What is it?” I looked up, stifling a cough.
“It’s a summary of the report finalising the case of Mclary versus Mclary.”
“And am I still in trouble?”
The thought of dying in prison?
Of living my last ticking time without Della?
Fuck, it was more than I cou
ld bear.
Della stiffened beside me, ready to leap up and strangle the detective, just like I was ready to commit murder to ensure I stayed out of jail.
Screw treatment and houses and towns, I’d take her back to the forest and live for however long I could, happy and content, just her and me.
“You can’t blame him,” Della snapped. “He didn’t do anything—”
“Ribbon.” I placed a rough hand over her soft one, keeping her steady. “Quiet.”
She flashed me a look, her gaze lingering on my mouth.
I had an insane urge to kiss her, to kiss her as much as I possibly could before…I couldn’t.
Martin shook his head. “No. We’ve ruled Miss Mclary was placed in that backpack by her mother, and you were unaware. Under that proviso, we aren’t calling it a kidnapping.”
“What are you calling it?” I asked around a slight cough.
Della narrowed her eyes, her fingers flinching under mine.
“A rescue.” He smiled gently. “A miracle that two kids survived against all odds.”
“Wow.” John cleared his throat, tears glittering in his big eyes. Ever since losing Patricia, and now my secret malady, he wore his emotions on his sleeve—a gruff, grizzly bear turned into a teddy.
He was against me not telling Della. He hated that I’d forbid him from informing anyone.
But that was my choice, and he had to honour it.
Otherwise, well—I’d promised he’d never see us again if he did.
It was my secret to tell…when I was ready.
John flicked me a glance before asking the officer, “So…what does that mean?”
Martin grinned. “It means he’s free.”
My shoulders sagged as if someone cut my strings. Della slouched too, a massive sigh exploding from her lips and making the pages dance.
“Now that there’s a surviving heir to the Mclary estate, I advise you to get in touch with a lawyer to see what value you’ll receive once the bank has claimed the outstanding debt. You’ll have to undergo a DNA test to confirm you are their descendent, but that’s just a formality.”
I stiffened, recalling what poison existed on that farm and that I hadn’t been the only one living there. “Should she undergo any other tests? To make sure she’s healthy?”
John smothered a heavy sigh laced with sadness. “Shit, you don’t think she has—”