She dangles a Twizzler in front of my face, and I lean forward and bite off the end, wrapping my free hand around hersmaller one to steady it. She doesn’t pull away immediately, and maybe I can blame the comfort of her warm skin for what comes out of my mouth next.
“My mom spent hours trying to figure out why her body turned against her.” I keep my eyes on the road, tightening my grip on the steering wheel as I feel Sloane go still in the passenger seat. “Was it the cleaning products she used? The bottled hair dye to cover her premature grays? For a while, she was convinced it was the water in our apartment complex that never ran fully clear. There were so many possibilities and not one answer.”
“Not having answers sucks big time,” she says quietly, all the levity from our snack debate drained from her voice.
Fuck.
Why did I choose to go down this road when we have nothing but highway in front of us for hours? I don’t talk about my mother or her death to anyone with this level of detail. Even my brother knows the topic is off-limits, and he didn’t even get a pass when he was a half-dozen whiskeys deep and crying on my kitchen floor.
“She hated feeling like her body betrayed her,” I continue, apparently unable to make myself shut up. Talking to Sloane is too easy, like some locked door inside me swings open before I can stop it. But her story isn’t my mother’s, and I don’t get to project old ghosts onto what she survived. “Not knowing why ate away at her as much as the disease.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. “I had a few weeks of going down the why rabbit hole too,” she says. “Eventually, I decided none of it was going to help me or change what was already happening. So I set my sights on radical acceptance.”
I feel those words all the way down to my bones. Damn, she blows me away.
“I think…” I clear my throat. “I think that’s extremely admirable.”
“I wasn’t always successful. But I kept trying, and eventuallythings got better, both physically and emotionally.” Her laugh holds an edge of self-deprecation. She’s a big fan of that. “Not before they got worse, though.”
“I wish I’d known,” I say. “I could have?—”
“No.” The word carries a vehemence I don’t understand. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to see me sick.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“Don’t lie,” she says sharply. “You know better than most people that cancer makes everything different.”
“But you?—”
“I didn’t wantanyoneto see me at my worst, not even my friends. I was in Nashville, so it wasn’t that hard to keep them away.”
“I was in Nashville,” I mutter, feeling the cord of regret tighten around my neck. So close and yet…
“You were probably touring.” She flips a licorice strand toward me, clearly wanting to lighten the tension that has crept up in the SUV’s interior. I take it from her, because what else can I do?
A thought springs to mind that makes the Twizzler turn to ash in my mouth. “Tell me you weren’t alone.”
She shakes her head. “Jeremy was with me the whole time. There was no chance of keeping him away.”
“What about your parents?” I ask, wondering if she’ll reveal any more.
“They mostly called. Well, they mostly pretended I was fine. Jeremy flew them in one weekend for a visit, but it was awkward and not good for any of us.”
My blood heats with the way she talks so matter-of-factly about her negligent parents when she deserved every bit of support the people around her could muster.
“When was this?”
“I came to Vanderbilt for a stem cell transplant right after Thanksgiving.” She adjusts the visor against the low afternoonsun. “I was supposed to be there a couple of weeks, but I had a reaction to the drugs and kind of crashed.”
“Kind of?”
“Fully,” she admits in a flat voice.
“That must have been terrifying.” And now I’m even more enraged at her mom and dad.
“I didn’t love it, that’s for sure. Ended up being in the hospital for almost two months. I was weak as a day-old kitten when I got out.”
I shake my head. “I was back in Whisper Falls for the holidays and then flew to New York to finish recording an album with a friend of mine. If I’d been in Nashville, I might have seen you. I try to get to the oncology floor at least once a month.”
