“Maybe just a little.”
Nathan got her set up with the right medication, helped her adjust her pillows, and asked a few more questions. Just as he was wrapping up, Elizabeth’s daughter arrived with her kids, and the room was full of laughter as Elizabeth’s eight-year-old grandson climbed onto the bed to show her a picture he’d drawn that day. Nathan smiled at the heartwarming scene before bidding Elizabeth goodbye and slipping out.
Once he was outside, he looked around for Zoe. He half-expected her to be sitting in the truck, but she wasn’t there. After a minute, he spotted her sitting on a bench on the far side of the overgrown garden, listlessly pulling petals off a flower. Her gaze was fixed straight ahead, and tears slipped from her eyes, though she barely seemed to notice them. Her hair was escaping from her bun to fall in curly strands around her face. In the fading sunlight, she looked both sad and lovely, and Nathan’s view of her shifted. She didn’t look like the consummate professional he’d met before. She looked vulnerable. Real.
Nathan crossed the yard to sit beside her on the bench. She looked at him, her eyes still shining.
“Are you okay?” Nathan asked.
“I’m fine.” She picked at the flower in her hands again.
Nathan let out a little sigh. She was clearly not fine. “I know being around patients on end-of-life care is difficult. I’m sorry you had to see that.”
Zoe gave a choked little laugh. “It’s not my first time seeing end-of-life care.”
Nathan paused, his mind racing. “Did you lose someone?”
“I…” Zoe shook her head, wiping fiercely at the tears that still shone on her cheeks. “It doesn’t matter. We should get back to town. You wanted to talk about the show, right?” She stood abruptly.
Nathan reached for her hand and gently tugged her back down onto the bench. Her hand was small and cold in his, despite the warm day, and he didn’t let go.
“It does matter,” he said firmly. “It matters to me.”
She lifted her free hand to rub across her collarbone and took a deep breath. For a few minutes, they sat in silence, the warm June evening punctuated by the trilling songs of birds. Nathan thought she might refuse to speak, but after a while, she began.
“It was my mother.”
The single sentence hit Nathan in the gut. He squeezed her hand. It should have felt unnatural, holding the hand of a woman he’d spent the last week locked in combat with over every little thing, but it felt right somehow.
“What happened?” he asked.
“When I was eight, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.” Zoe shook her head, sending a few more strands springing free of her bun. “Lung cancer! She’d never smoked a cigarette in her life, but there it was. Stage three. They said she had months, maybe years, but in the end, it was only weeks.” Her voice broke. “We brought her home, my dad and I. Once we knew it was too late. Set up a bed in the living room. Watched silly rom-coms and talked and just sat with her while she slept. Watched her grow weaker and weaker.”
Nathan was overwhelmed with sympathy for the woman beside him. It was all too easy to imagine her as an eight-year-old, sitting on her mother’s hospital bed, struggling with feelings that were far too big for anyone to handle, especially a child.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, squeezing her hand again.
“No,I’msorry. I shouldn’t have run off.” Zoe rubbed at her collarbone again with her free hand. “It was a long time ago, but seeing Elizabeth in the hospital bed with all those machines and her scarf brought it all back. I felt like I was there again.”
“I know.” Nathan bit his lip. Even though it had been a few years, he remembered sitting at his father’s bedside as though it were yesterday. He would always remember holding his hand, feeling his papery skin, listening to the beep of the monitors. “I lost my father. Heart attack. Sometimes, it feels like I’ll always be stuck in that moment of sitting by his bedside, unable to help.”
Zoe lifted her brown eyes to his, her hand falling to her lap. There was something there, behind her careful expressions and perfectly done hair, a real spark of understanding.
“Exactly,” she breathed. “No one really knows unless they’ve been there.” She glanced back at the house. “How long does she have?”
“Not long,” Nathan said. He squeezed her hand again. “What was your mother like?”
Zoe smiled, a ghost of warmth. “She was wonderful. So full of life. Every day, it was like she was trying to enjoy every single moment life had to offer, whether that meant ice cream after school on our walk home or dancing while she cleaned the kitchen. After she was gone, that gave me some peace, because I knew she’d never let a single moment of her life go to waste.That’s why I try never to letmylife go to waste, either. She told me to chase my dreams and do whatever it took to build the life I wanted, so I do. Every day.”
“I see that,” Nathan said, and Zoe gave a wry smile.
“I suppose it isn’t always easy on the people around me. I can be a little… intense.”
Though it was definitely true, Nathan shook his head. “Intense? You? Never.”
Zoe laughed at that, a hesitant sound that gave away how close she still was to tears. “Thanks.”
“Do you look like her?” Nathan asked. Zoe smoothed her free hand over her pulled-back hair.
