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“So, you haven’t found anyone yet?” she said. “And when you do, then you’re going to leave me?”

I sighed.

“Look, Leona, we’re friends, right?” She searched my gaze with her own.

“Yeah, we’re friends,” I said.

“So, you can tell me if you’re going back to that guy, that wolf king dude, the one who did you wrong. It was fifteen years ago. If he’s changed, if he’s groveled, I will not judge you.”

“I’m not going back to him,” I said.

“No?”

“But I do think I’m going back to Riverside.”

“Yeah,” she said. “You only came to the city to escape that part of you. But now, I can see that you’re, you know, better than you used to be. Every time you come back from a weekend where you shift, you seem less frazzled and calmer and more grounded in this really beautiful way.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“I won’t stand in your way,” she said. “Put in your two weeks’ like a normal person, though. I can handle it, you quitting your job. We can stay friends, too. I’ll come out and visit you. We’ll go out on the river together.”

“Really?”

She grinned. “I want you to be happy, Leona. I’m not just your boss, I’m your friend.”

That night, I went back and finished reading Opal’s manuscript.

I stayed up, in bed, turning the pages.

She repeated herself a lot at the end. She wrote about how she hadn’t planned it, how she hadn’t meant to hurt me, how she only wanted everyone to be happy, how she wanted me to look after her boys, to be good to them.

She wrote about how she was in pain, how she had bad days and good days.

One passage really stuck with me. It made me cry.

OPAL

MY HENRY IS only three years old, and he doesn’t understand what is happening. At the beginning, I made time to be with him, and I sacrificed everything else to make sure that the time I had with Henry was as normal as possible.

So, if I knew that I could have about five hours a day where I could be on my feet, standing up, doing things, those five hours were with Henry, taking him to the park, stacking blocks with him, reading him stories, tickling his belly, all of it.

I didn’t want him to suffer.

But also, I didn’t want to acknowledge how much of it I was going to miss.

I had to take a break there from typing, because I broke down and sobbed. Sometimes, I cannot help it, I feel so angry and bitter, and I want to rage at the universe and say that it isn’t fair, and this should not be happening, and I expect that someone is going to agree with me, someone in charge, someone who decides these things.

“Yes,” they’ll say, “you don’t deserve to die in your early thirties, Opal. You should be allowed to see your baby boy grow up. You should be allowed to see both of your boys get married and go to college and have their first car wrecks and have their first heartbreaks and everything in between. You should be allowed to have that.”

I keep thinking, deep down, that’s going to happen.

And then, I realize, over and over again, that it’s not.

Every time I realize it, it hurts again, hurts fresh, like the first time I found out that I was diagnosed with this sickness.

I say I’ve made peace with it. And most of the time, I even really have, but there are these moments where I really haven’t, and where it all still feels unreal. I guess they call that denial. It’s a grief stage, and you cycle in and out of it.

I hate it, for the record.