Dad chuckles and then starts going on about the Thunder’s prospects in the upcoming playoffs. I listen, but my brain is elsewhere. I’m planning what I will say to back up Dad’s decision and how I will console my sisters. And then, as I run my words over and over in my head, along with every possibility from my family being okay with it to them screaming at the top of their lungs in protest, I remember Griffin’s words from this morning.
“My question is, who is helping you come to terms with this?”
Where is he? Why isn’t he there for me?
As my dad tries to explain what the Thunder need to do to make it back to the Stanley Cup Finals, I pull out my phone and turn it back on. I’ve got three more texts from Dixie asking me explicit questions about last night and what happened between Griffin and me. Everything fromWas he good? Did you come?toI hope you didn’t forget how to do it. It’s not like riding a bike.But nothing from him. I text him.
Can you call me?
My phone buzzes again. My heart leaps and then nosedives when I see it’s just Dixie demanding, in all caps, that I answer her immediately. I shove my phone back in my purse.
“Pumpkin, are you listening to me?”
“Sure, Dad.” I grin at him, even though it’s hard. “You said Thunder blah, blah, blah. Jude blah, blah, blah. Hockey blah, blah, blah.”
He laughs.
“Good to see you laughing.” My mom’s voice fills the room from behind me, and I turn to see her smiling back at my dad. She squeezes my shoulder as she passes by me on her way to my dad.
The look on my dad’s face when he sees my mom is utter perfection. It’s love, adoration, and elation all whirling together. It’s the look every woman deserves to see from the man she spends her life with.
“Sadie won’t listen to my predictions for tonight’s game,” he complains as Winnie and Dixie walk into the room after my mom.
“Ugh. Hockey,” Dixie says dramatically. “Can we talk about something else? Like why Sadie doesn’t know how to answer text messages suddenly.”
Oh, Dix, be careful what you wish for.
Winnie drops down on one side of me on the bed and Dixie on the other. Mom grabs the extra chair and pulls it up next to dad by the window.
“Well, the doctor came by with the results of the tests they did yesterday,” Dad starts, and everyone freezes. “Let’s all sit down.”
Dixie and Winnie both look at me, and I take their each of their hands as I swallow down all the emotions brewing inside of me and almost choke.
21
Sadie
When are you telling Jude?” Winnie asks me from the back seat of Dixie’s Mini.
“I’m not. Zoey is,” I tell Winnie and try not to be annoyed that she just assumes this is my responsibility. “Dad and Mom told her this afternoon when she visited with Declan while Jude was taking his pregame nap.”
“He’s going to be devastated.” Dixie states the obvious as she pulls into the parking lot of the Thunder arena. “I told Eli earlier. Are you telling Griffin?”
“I tried,” I reply, and a wave of something that feels like rejection washes over me. “He didn’t answer.”
“Are you kidding me?” Winnie ask incredulously. “All day?”
I shrug and dig my phone out of my purse for the first time in hours. I didn’t hear it ring or a text message alert go off, but I glance at the screen now to double check. It’s black. Oh, my God, I have accidentally turned it off somehow.
“I told Ty,” Winnie tells us and sniffs. She’s finally stopped crying, but from the moment we left the hospital a couple hours ago, she’s been breaking down in little sobbing fits. Surprisingly, neither Dixie nor Winnie argued with Dad about his decision. But since we left him and Mom alone at the hospital and went home to grab some food before the game, they’ve been begging me to change his mind, hammering me with questions, looking for loopholes in his rationale. Like maybe I hold some kind of extra nurse-only information that would contradict the vicious facts of this illness and make him change his mind. I don’t. They know it, yet we talk about it for hours anyway.
I turn my phone back on and curse its slowness as it comes back to life.
“I would rather be anywhere but here,” Winnie groans as we get out of the car and walk toward the entrance. There are hoards of fans around us, buzzing with excitement. It’s so completely contradictory to our emotions, it almost feels like we’re living in an alternate universe.
We walk to the private entrance and swipe our passes at the gate. “We have to go, and we have to pretend to have fun. It’s what Dad wants,” Dixie mutters. “He explicitly said we have to go to the game and cheer on Jude and Eli.”
I stare at my screen. I have four missed calls from Griffin. There’s one voicemail, so I type in my password so I can listen to it.
