“Beach,” I reply as we sway gently from side to side.
“We were just there in March. You don’t want to go anywhere else?”
I press in close, rising on my tiptoes. My heart begins to hammer in fast staccatos when I ask him, “Do you remember what we did that night on Serenity Point?”
Ryder’s hands go to the straps of my dress. He slides his index fingers under the thin strips and pushes them off my shoulders. My eyes flutter closed, and I get lost in his seduction.
“Of course, I remember. I made love to you on the beach under the stars,” he replies.
I take his hand and press it to my stomach, tears already gathering in my eyes. He glances between us where our hands are joined.
A moment.
A breath.
His eyes fly up to mine. “Elizabeth?”
The tears come freely now, and I nod my head yes. Four pregnancy tests say yes.
Ryder falls to his knees and looks up at me, the beatific smile overtaking his gorgeous face making my heart melt in the most amazing way. “Holy shit! We’re having a baby,” he says in wonderment.
A baby. A family of our own.
And I can’t wait to start this next chapter of our life together.
Chapter Two
ELIZABETH
Sixteen years later
Forever is a Lie
AML.Three letters of the alphabet, not even a word. Philadelphia is a word. It’s a city in Pennsylvania. Birthplace of American democracy. Home to the Liberty Bell. The town where our nation’s Founding Fathers drafted both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But tack on the wordpositiveto Philadelphia and you get something horrific.
My vocabulary for the past couple of days has become words and acronyms that I never would have thought I’d use when talking about my husband. Acronyms such as AML and BCR-ABL, or words such as allogeneic donor, bone marrow graft, and ablative chemotherapy.
But the words I abhor the most? Acute myelogenous leukemia.
Cancer of the blood and bone marrow caught too late, our treatment options limited.
The man I love more than life itself—the boy who stole my heart when I was only nine years old—is now a statistic. A horrifying, ugly, soul-crushing statistic.
The Fates have thrown me an ironic nightmare. Oncology is what I specialized in at medical school. Cancer research is what I have devoted my life’s work to. And now? The one thing I am supposed to be an expert in is the one thing I have no control over. I can’t cure Ryder’s cancer. I can’t take it away. All those years of medical school, all the blood, sweat, and tears I shed—it was all for nothing.
If I had one wish, I would wish that life were words written in pencil on a piece of paper. Then, I could erase life’s mistakes and rewrite our stories. Eventually, however, the eraser at the end of the pencil would be used up, rubbed down until only the metal casing scraped the surface of the paper, and life could no longer be altered and recrafted.
The Keurig sputters and clicks off. The sound is abnormally loud in the dark quietude of the kitchen, like the echo of a final heartbeat.
I stayed up all night, holding Ryder close, watching each steady rise and fall of his chest until desolation wrapped its cold fingers around my throat, and I fled our bed, not wanting to wake him when I fell apart. After throwing up a few times in the hall bathroom, I wandered the house like a ghost’s lost soul for who knows how long until I eventually stumbled into the kitchen.
Through the large window that faces the backyard, a faint line of gold edges where sky meets the curvature of earth, spilling light through the trees and signaling a new day is about to begin.
With trembling hands, I take my coffee with me, but I only get within feet of the patio door before my legs refuse to go any farther. The thought of watching the sunrise alone, something Ryder and I do together every morning, punches a hole in my chest and rips out my barely beating heart. We were supposed to have a lifetime of sunrises and quiet mornings to share.
In my mind, I see it all—our children growing up, getting married, starting their own families—and for every new, precious memory made, Ryder and I would share it with them together.
The pain of what should have been but will never be—I can’t breathe. How can I breathe again without him?
