"Thank you for the medical opinion. Very helpful."
A ghost of a smile crossed her face. "Someone has to keep you accountable." She gestured to the flat, moss-covered rock we used to sit on during our skipped classes. "Should we sit? This feels like a sitting conversation."
"It's a tough conversation," I said quietly.
"I figured." She sat down on the rock, leaving space beside her. "That's why I'm here."
I sat, not touching her, the cold of the stone seeping through my jeans immediately. The river murmured past us, the same river that had witnessed our first kiss. Now it would witness whatever this was: ending or beginning, I still didn't know.
"Charlotte." I stared at the water because looking at her made it harder to say what I needed to say. "What you offered atthe house some days ago, helping with the exercises, the meals, being there, it is the kindest thing anyone has ever offered me."
"I sense a 'but' coming."
"A big one." I forced myself to turn and meet her eyes. "I can't accept it. Not until you understand what you'd actually be signing up for."
She didn't flinch. "Then explain it to me."
So I did. Not the sanitized version, not the "managing a condition" spin. The brutal, clinical truth.
"I have early-onset Parkinson's disease, which you already know," I began. "It's degenerative. Progressive. There is no cure."
"I know what Parkinson's is, Miles." Her voice was gentle but firm. "I'm a nurse."
"Then you know the medications help with symptoms, but don't stop the progression. You know I might not get better." I swallowed hard. "In fact, I will almost certainly get worse."
"That's one possibility."
"It's the most likely possibility." I pushed on, needing her to see the full picture. "It starts with the tremor, the stiffness. But it moves to gait, to balance. I'll lose coordination. Simple tasks will become struggles, then impossibilities."
"I've seen Parkinson's patients?—"
"Independence goes next," I continued, the words coming faster now. "Driving. Dressing. Feeding myself. You could spend years watching that happen. A relationship that starts as a partnership, transforming into caregiving. Love curdling into obligation. Into resentment."
"You're dooming yourself."
"I'm being realistic." I turned to face her fully. "And that's not even the worst part."
She waited, her expression unreadable.
"The cognitive decline." The words felt like swallowing glass. "The dementia. With my particular genetic situation, it's not just possible, it's likely. And it's already starting."
Now I had her full attention. Her nurse's mask slipped slightly, revealing something that might have been fear.
"You asked about my father," I said, my voice dropping. "I didn’t get the chance to say everything, so let me tell you what his last year looked like."
I drew a shaky breath. This was the part I'd never told anyone. The part I'd carried alone for three years, a weight so heavy it had reshaped my entire understanding of love and loss.
"The dementia stole him piece by piece. First, it was names, he'd call me by my uncle's name, then correct himself. Then it was dates, events, the sequence of his own life, scrambling like a dropped deck of cards. Then it was how to use a fork. How to find the bathroom in a house he'd lived in for forty years."
Charlotte's hand moved toward mine, then stopped. She was listening.
"The final month…" My voice cracked. "He didn't know who I was. This man, this brilliant, controlled, formidable man who'd shaped my entire life with the force of his will... he'd look at me with these blank, terrified eyes. He'd ask who I was. When his wife was coming home."
A hot tear escaped, tracing a cold path down my cheek. "He didn't remember she'd died six months before. Every time I told him, it was fresh grief. So I stopped telling him. I just said she'd be back soon."
"Miles—"
"The pain of that." I wiped my face roughly with the back of my hand. "Seeing someone you love look at you like a stranger. Being completely unable to reach them, to comfort them, to make them understand that you're safe. It's a special kind of hell."
