“Kane?” I parrot, dumbstruck.
“That boyfriend of yours.” She reaches for the stack of folders and flips through them while I stand there like an idiot.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I hear myself say, but my thoughts are elsewhere as I try to make sense of this new information. Why would Kane pay for my Mom’s medical treatment? That makes no sense.
“No?” she asks, mildly curious yet also distracted by the note she peruses. “Does he know that?”
“What?”
There’s only one word to describe this emotion.
Confusion.
None of this makes sense.
Madsen looks up from her notes. “He’s in love with you.”
I open and shut my mouth like a fish out of water while she continues flicking through notes and typing on her computer, but no words come out. Honestly, I don’t know what to say. My brain has short-circuited.
“That was a lot of money,” I say after a while, more to myself.
“I rest my case. The boy cares about you.”
I snap my gaze to her. The computer screen reflects off her glasses, which she put back on earlier while my brain was slow to catch up.
“It’s pocket money to him.”
I feel like I need to point that out.
“Maybe,” she murmurs, “but he didn’t have to come in here to take care of your family’s debt.”
When I frown, she removes her glasses again with a sigh and gives me her full attention. “He paid it all off.”
All of it? No. Why?
“W-when?” I ask instead.
“Oh, weeks ago now.”
“Weeks ago??” I sputter.
How do I process this? I don’t even know how to feel about it. He paid my mom’s bills. When? And why? Because he cares? No, he doesn’t. It’s his ego, right? It feels good to flex. But if that were the case, he would have said something.
Right?
But he didn’t.
Meanwhile, I had no idea my mom had been cared for this whole time.
“You should hold onto him. “He’s a good egg,” she says, stealing me from my thoughts. I open my mouth to reply, but Chris barrels past, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. Irun after him, intercepting him before he can leave. “Where are you going?”
Tension rolls off him. He looks over the top of my head, gazing out the window beyond the waiting area. There’s nothing there except a gloomy parking lot… nothing except poverty and lost dreams.
Chris’s throat bobs with a swallow, his roughened voice rasping low when he finally speaks. “I can’t do this. I can’t fucking watch her die.”
My heart clenches hard enough to blur my vision. The words I want to say burn in my throat as I stare at his hard face. He won’t look at me, and it hurts more than this growing silence between us. I search for Mom and Dad in his features. For myself. It’s there, in his eye color and the straight bridge of his nose. I love him, but fuck, I hate him too. Especially now that he’s about to walk out when I need him the most.
I want to slap his chest. I want to beat him until this crushing pain claws its way through my chest. But I also want to wrap my arms around his waist and hold on tightly until this storm passes, like he’s my life raft.
