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I checked my watch. Jesus, it was almost 2:00 p.m.

“Come on—I’m taking you to get some food.” I helped her up, putting an arm around her waist. She was so frail. The sides of her stomach were hard.

Something is wrong.

I helped her to my truck and went to the closest fast-food place I could find. It wasn’t what she probably wanted. She fucking hated Burger King, but I needed to get food in her.

We went through the drive-thru and parked in the parking lot. I unwrapped her burger and watched her eat. She looked exhausted. Her skin was sallow.

“Are you diabetic?” I asked, studying her.

“No.” She sniffed.

“Are you sure?”

She ate a french fry slowly. “Yes.”

“Does diabetes run in your family? Do any of your relatives have it?”

“I know what ‘runs in the family’ means,” she snapped. She shot me a glare and I smiled, happy she had moved from hypoglycemic to just plain hangry.

“And no, nobody has it. And neither do I.”

I put the straw in the top of her orange juice and handed it to her. “How do you know?”

“Because I don’t have time to be diabetic, Joshua.”

I scoffed. Of course.

“Look, you need to go to the doctor and have a glucose test. Has this ever happened before?”

She shook her head.

I glanced down at her stomach. The tank top she’d worn under my sweatshirt was fitted. From what I could tell, her stomach hadn’t gotten bigger than it was a few weeks ago. In fact, it looked a little smaller. I wondered if that meant the fibroids were shrinking. Could they respond to weight loss like the rest of her? It didn’t seem likely.

I wanted to feel her abdomen, see if I could use my medical training to figure out what was wrong. But she never let me touch her stomach.

“When is your surgery scheduled?” I asked.

She took a sip from the soda. “Two weeks ago.”

“When are you going to reschedule it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Not anytime soon. It’s a six- to eight-week recovery. I have nobody to take care of me—”

“I’ll take care of you.”

She pressed her lips into a line. “I need to be with Sloan.”

I sat back in the seat, shutting my eyes. I needed her to fucking take care of herself.

Did what she had going on have to do with her condition? But insulin came from the pancreas. What did uterine tumors have to do with a pancreas? I wondered if whatever caused this had been lurking for some time. If she never let herself get hungry, she’d never get hypoglycemic. She was always really good about eating. She might not have ever let it get to this point before.

“I’m okay,” she said.

I opened my eyes. “No, you’re not. You look sick. You’re pale. Your pulse is weak. You almost passed out back there. You could have had a seizure. What if you had been driving?”

Protectiveness coursed through me. She was mine. I needed to be able to take care of her, and she wouldn’t let me fucking do it. It defied all the laws of nature. It was wrong. We were in love, and I was supposed to be there for her.