“No.”
“When were you going to tell me? Were you going to wait until something actually happened and just casually mention it?”
She dipped her head. “I always meant to tell you when you were old enough. It just…time went by and it got hard.”
“This is about me too. Didn’t you think of that?”
“Of course I did. I think of it every day.”
He suddenly ran out of steam. “So you could start losing your memory any time?”
“Yes.” There was no way to sugarcoat it.
“And then how long?”
“It depends. With Grandma, it took about five years from the time she started showing symptoms.”
“Five years? That’s it?” He looked young and afraid and she hated that she’d done this to him. Possibly passed on this curse and left him to deal with it.
“You have every right to be angry with me,” she said. “And if you really want to know, I’ll go back and get tested.”
“But you said you don’t want to know.”
“I’ll do it if it makes you feel better.” The thought of going back to Jeannette and taking the test filled her with a panicky dread, but she would do it for him. Only for Andrew would she go down that road.
He slumped back onto the log. “Could I get tested at some point even if you don’t?”
“I suppose so. They know what mutation to test for.”
“I don’t want to make you get tested if you don’t want to,” he said miserably. “I don’t even know if I’d want to. This whole thing is so fucked.”
She put an arm around him, and he leaned into her. “Yes, that’s a very good way of putting it. But you have time to make that decision. And maybe in ten years they’ll have a cure or at least a way of slowing it down.”
“There isn’t anything now?”
“Nothing that makes any difference.”
He looked at her anxiously, like the small boy he’d once been. “But you’re okay now, right? You haven’t started, like forgetting things?”
She kissed his cheek, which like her own was damp with tears. “I’m okay now.”
...
They started up running again, leaving what was left of the woods and dropping to the street. They ran the back roads ofLaurelton amid the glossy green abandon of late spring. Past stone walls and a neighbor seeding his lawn. Skirting a thorny wild rose that had run amok near someone’s mailbox. The conversation with Andrew had been hard. So hard. But she felt a kind of peace. At least now he knew.
“There’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about too,” Andrew said shyly as they caught their breath back at her father’s cul de sac.
For a moment, she felt a throb of fear but he looked calm.
“I saw the therapist yesterday. Janice. The one Dr. Milburn recommended.”
“I’m so glad.” Cassie felt her chest warm. Finally, a bit of good news. “You don’t have to tell me what you talked about, but how did it go?”
“I thought she would tell me what to do, but she mostly asked a lot of questions. What’s going on, how I feel about stuff.”
“Did it help, to talk to someone?”
“More than I thought it would,” he admitted. “I made another appointment for next week.”
