Page 106

He didn’t look up.

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he might be crying.

I wanted to tell him that everything would be okay, like he’d told me once. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to give him false hope.

Then I realized that day in his office when he said that to me, he hadn’t meant it. How could he? He didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.

It wasn’t until just now that he realized how hopeless it all really was.

CHAPTER 27

THEY THOUGHT THEY HAD EVERYTHING, THEN

DISASTER STRUCK!

ADRIAN

We went around in circles about it all night. Me begging her, her digging in. We somehow faked our way through dinner and then went back to our room and picked up where we left off. Finally, we fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

I’d been in the same tornado she was this whole time. I’d been in the eye, in the calm, while it built up all around me without me knowing, and now I was sucked into the vortex, spinning in the howling black, grasping for something to hold on to, and there was nothing. She wouldn’t give me anything to cling to. Nothing to give me hope.

Yesterday I’d driven us home. We barely talked the whole six hours.

We weren’t fighting. We weren’t mad at each other. We were just at odds, and there was nothing to say.

As we’d passed a billboard for Minnesota’s Largest Candy Store, she waved a white flag and asked me if I wanted to go. I didn’t. I just wanted to get home. I wasn’t up for any adventures or side trips. I wanted to be back in our space, where I didn’t have to pretend to be okay because we were in public—because I was not okay. At all.

I didn’t begin to know how to accept the situation.

I understood Vanessa’s reasoning, but I still couldn’t support it.

She didn’t know whether she’d have the same reaction to the drugs that Melanie did. What if she tolerated them without side effects? She wouldn’t know unless she tried them. Three months wasn’t much—but it was something. It was better than nothing. How could she throw away three months of life without even trying?

What if the next clinical trial brought the cure? Or halted the disease in its tracks? Or reversed it altogether? What if that trial was happening now, and she wasn’t there to participate in it?

It was unacceptable to me. Unfathomable.

How could she just give up?

Waves of anxiety and panic had been rolling over me for two days. I’d never been this tired. It was an emotional weariness that settled in my bones. I felt hopeless. Powerless. I wanted to save her, do something, but my hands were tied because she wouldn’t even give me one thing. Not one thing.

If she’d agreed to see someone about her hand, at least I could busy myself with looking for specialists, making appointments for her. There’d be an actionable plan, there’d be something happening. But there was nothing to do. She wanted me to just forget about it. To sit here and go to candy stores with her and pretend like my entire universe hadn’t just imploded.

When my alarm clock went off Monday morning for work, I was already up, reading ALS case studies and pouring over medical journals in my office. I’d been up for hours. There was a manic energy to it, a frantic need to educate myself, to be able to present every angle to her, counter every point.

I argued for a living. I convinced juries of twelve that guilty men were innocent. And I couldn’t convince one woman to take life-extending medications or agree to a clinical trial to save herself. There had never been anything more important, and I’d never felt so incompetent. I felt like I was riding the edge of a mental breakdown, like I was living in a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from, running to exhaustion because if I stopped moving, it would knock me down so hard I’d never get up.

Nothing would ever be as good again…

From this point on, I’d always be living in the shattered afterward of this disease. Even if by some miracle this thing with her hand wasn’t ALS, she could still get sick at any time, and if she did, she wouldn’t fight then either. We would never be free of it. And if she wouldn’t agree to fight it, then we’d never even have hope.

I wanted to go back to being blissfully ignorant. I wanted to forget.

I dragged myself to the bathroom and took a shower to go to work and then stood next to the bed, knotting my tie, looking down on her sleeping like I’d done last week.

So much had happened in seven days.

Last week my whole life had been perfect. Our future was bright and endless and there was nothing but possibility. I had everything. I had her. And I thought I’d always have her.