Page 85 of Let the Light Shine Through

“I love Gia.” The hand stuffed in his pocket might as well have my heart in its grip. “But no, she’s like my little sister.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“You look—”

“Young? Yeah, I get that a lot.” Bryce gets that embarrassed look again, making me feel like shit. It’s not that he looks young, it’s that he’s really small. Sickly almost.

The day’s events come back to me, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Gia was asking him how he was feeling, and while everyone else was hungover from last night, Bryce wasn’t one of them. He couldn’t have been because he didn’t drink anything. At least not during the time that I watched him and Gia with hawk eyes.

“How do you know Gia?”

“Her mom, Vita, and I got chemo at the same time.” He adjusts the beanie on his head, revealing hair with that newly grown-in look.

“Shit. Sorry, dude. I didn’t know. Did you…”

“Beat it?” he supplies, then nods.

“That’s good. Congrats.”

“Last we checked anyway.”

“You have to keep checking, huh? It can come back?”

“It can do whatever it wants.” He shrugs. “That’s the thing about cancer, it doesn’t really tell you its plans ahead of time.”

I blow out a breath, tugging on the collar of my hoodie.

“Luckily, we caught mine early though.”

“That must’ve been pretty hard going through that in only your teens, right?”

If Vita died three years ago and they got treatment together, he was fucking young.

“Cancer’s a real asshole.” His glacial blue eyes pin me in place. “It doesn’t see age.”

A lump settles in my throat as I bob my head, dropping my gaze to the ground.

“It’s probably a good thing Gia’s so damn proactive.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well…because her mom…” He eyes me carefully.

“Yeah, I heard.” Gia doesn’t really talk about it though, not like this. She talks about her mom and what she meant to her, but not about her death. I don’t even know what kind of cancer Vita died from. “But cancer’s not hereditary, is it?”

“I had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which the mutation could’ve been passed down to me, but neither of my parents had it, so mine probably wasn’t. But, you know, Gia was practically Vita’s doppelganger.” He lets that linger, but I still don’t really understand. Why does them looking alike matter? “Add that to the fact that Vita died of the same exact cancer her mother did and I’d be getting biopsies, too.”

Biopsies?

“What’s that cancer called again?” I ask, my eyes already seeking Gia out.

“Melanoma.”

Skin cancer.

Biopsies.