It felt like a dream yet so familiar. The sobs came suddenly, violently. I pressed my hand over my mouth but couldn’t stop them. Tears streamed hot down my face, blurring everything in front of me.
I was dying. Actually dying. Three to six months and I was already past that timeline, living on borrowed time that should have already run out.
My hand touched something else in the folder.
A journal.
Stars and moons on the cover, faded now. The bucket list Pauline and I had made.
I pulled it out with trembling, wet hands..
My own teenage handwriting—big and loopy and optimistic:
100 Things To Do Before I Turn Thirty
But it was violently crossed out, black ink slashed through the words over and over until the original text was barely visible.
Above it, in shakier handwriting that I also recognized as mine—recent, desperate:Before I Die
My vision swam with fresh tears.
I flipped through pages with shaking hands.
Number 23: Have a man win me something ridiculous at a carnival.
Number 61: Bake something from scratch with someone I love –
Number 40: Kiss at the top of a ferris wheel.
The carnival. The baking. The ferris wheel kiss that had felt so spontaneous, so perfect, so real.
None of it had been real. None of it had been mine. None of it had been his idea.
He’d been working through my stupid teenage bucket list, giving a dying girl what she’d written down when she was sixteen and thought she had forever.
Every perfect moment had been, planned, checked off a list like a task to complete.
Not because he loved me.
Because he pitied me.
I wasn’t Michael’s wife.
I was his charity case.
His dying obligation.
Every “I love you” had been said with an expiration date in mind.
The sobs came harder now, different—not just grief but betrayal, sharp and bitter in my throat. I hunched over thejournal as tears fell onto the pages, smudging the ink. My whole body shook with the force of crying.
I sat in his office surrounded by proof of my own death, when I heard footsteps.
Coming down in this direction. Fast. Running.
The office door burst open.
Michael stood in the doorway, chest heaving like he’d sprinted up the stairs.
