“WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO tell him?” Birdie asked for the third time this week.
I finished loading the dishwasher and pressed the power button, busying myself with cleaning the counter. Birdie had been concocting all sorts of so-called meals, which mostly consisted of ice cream and peanut butter sandwiches, and she’d left a mess everywhere.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s got a lot going on right now. The trial is starting in three days. He can’t have this heaped on top of him with the pressures he’s already dealing with.”
“Well, it’s kind of important that you figure it out, isn’t it?” She propped her hip against the table. “You’re already two months in. Before you know it—”
“God, Birdie.” I dragged my hands over my face and groaned. “I can’t do this right now, okay? I’m doing my best to try to figure it out. But you nagging me isn’t helping.”
She looked at the floor and rolled the rubber end of her Adidas shoe against the tile. “I found something I think you should see.”
Her voice was too scratchy. She sounded emotional, and Birdie never got emotional unless she was in a fit of rage.
“What did you find, B?”
She gestured down the hall. “It’s in the safe. In your closet.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. “You were snooping?”
“I saw it, and I thought he might be hiding something in there, and I was right.”
“How the hell did you get in?” I demanded.
“It doesn’t matter how I got in.” She gave me a pointed stare. “All that matters is that I did, and you need to see what I found.”
She moved in the direction of the hall, signaling for me to follow, but I was rooted to the spot. My chest was so tight, it hurt to breathe, and dread curled in my stomach as I imagined all the horrors that might await me in that closet.
The first thing that came to my mind was that Lucian had someone else. It wasn’t logical, but it was pure jealousy and maybe a dash of pregnancy hormones that spurred the notion on. I knew instinctively that would be the most hurtful. I trusted him, and when he told me he was working long hours on Emmanuel’s case, I believed him. But now, I was doubting everything.
“I’m not sure I want to see,” I admitted. I looked weak for saying it, and I knew it.
“You need to see,” she pleaded. “This is important, Gypsy.”
I still didn’t move, and Birdie sighed. “Do you remember how you always used to tell me not to look away during the ugly parts of a movie?”
I nodded stiffly.
“You said you weren’t doing it to be mean, but because you wanted me to be tough. You wanted me to see the worst of things, so that I could always be prepared if anything bad ever happened to me.”
“I remember,” I croaked.
“Well, this is like that,” Birdie said. “I’m not doing it to be mean. I want you to see so you can be prepared.”
She was right, of course. I needed to see whatever was in that closet, no matter how bad it might be. I needed to know what secret Lucian had been keeping, and in preparation, I already felt my heart hardening around itself as I lurched forward and joined Birdie.
We walked together, and she led me into the closet that used to hold my trophies. The material items I’d collected from my victims over the years. Now, it held only department store clothes and Lucian’s lies.
Birdie retrieved a stack of old photos and handed them to me. “Did you know he already has a kid?”
My heart squeezed as I traced over the lines of the angelic baby face staring back at me. It was, without a doubt, Dawson. And he looked so much like his father, I wanted to cry all over again at the loss of him.
“He did,” I acknowledged. “But he passed away.”
I wasn’t in the mood to tell Birdie the rest, and I couldn’t believe she’d been snooping through Lucian’s things, getting me all worked up like this. “You need to put these back where you got them,” I told her. “Now.”
She glared at me. “I will after I show you the rest.”
“The rest?”
She bent down and wedged a finger between the safe door that was already cracked, pulling it back slowly to unveil the thing that would seal my fate with Lucian. My breath had stopped, but it returned when light poured into the small space, at least momentarily.
I stared at the orange bottles and looked at Birdie. “Prescriptions?”
She scooped a couple from the safe and handed them to me as I examined the labels. There was a supply of antibiotics, steroids prescribed for persistent cough, and cough syrup.
“This is what you had to show me?”
Birdie stared at me, exasperated. “He’s sick.”
“He’s not sick,” I argued. “He has bouts of bronchitis. We live in the desert. So what?”
Birdie shook her head, hopeless. “Haven’t you noticed anything else weird going on with him? Anything at all?”
I wanted to chalk this up to Birdie being dramatic, but she had a point. Acid burned the back of my throat as I recalled how sick he’d been when he needed to go to the hospital. The blood he coughed up. How his health had seemed to be declining rapidly lately, and I wanted to believe it was stress. He was exhausted all the time, and he seemed to have a fever every night in bed.
My mind hadn’t connected the dots in a way that could lead me to believe they were all related to one thing. I wanted to attribute those symptoms to his job, and I had. I’d swept them under the rug and choked down Lucian’s assurances that everything was fine. But when I looked at my little sister, it occurred to me that he wasn’t fine. In my gut, I knew it before Birdie even dropped the next bombshell.
“I didn’t want to do this,” she said with a gentleness uncharacteristic of her. “Believe me when I say I didn’t want to do this.”
She pulled something else from the bottom of the safe. A plain green file folder I didn’t want to open.
I wrapped my arms around myself. “I can’t. I can’t look.”
I felt like I was going to throw up, and Birdie took pity on me. She helped me back to the bed and let me sit down for a few minutes to process my wild thoughts. Logically, I knew there was no getting out of it. But logic no longer ruled my heart. Logic didn’t dictate the way I felt about Lucian and his presence in my life. I was carrying his baby. And now, the universe was about to deliver up another cruel slice of life.
“What is it?” I blurted. “Just tell me, B.”
She hesitated before sitting down beside me and staring at the file in her hands. “Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”
I didn’t know what that was. Or at least, exactly what that was. From what little I’d heard on TV, I knew it was a type of cancer , but I wasn’t ready to accept that.
I pulled the file from Birdie’s hands and began to tear through the pages frantically, seeking out some other possibility. Maybe she’d read it wrong. Maybe this wasn’t his. I had a plethora excuses at the ready, but with every page I turned, my reality grew smaller and darker.
“This says he was diagnosed two years ago.” My hands trembled, and tears leaked down my face before I could catch them. I wasn’t in the habit of letting Birdie see me cry, but it was too late now.
She placed a tentative hand on my back and rubbed in small, soft circles the way that I used to when she was a child. “It also said he refused treatment.”
A sob erupted from my chest just before I lunged from the bed and ran to the bathroom, scattering the papers everywhere as I vomited up my lunch in the toilet. When I was done, Birdie was beside me, sitting cross-legged on the tiled floor as she picked up the papers and tucked them away from my sight.
I hung my head against the seat and cried some more. It was uncontrollable at this point, and I didn’t care if Birdie saw anymore. Maybe it was about time she learned I was all show, and that deep inside, I was weak.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll get through this together. I promise you.”
Her words pulled me back to reality, and I straightened up, wiping the tears from my eyes.
“No.” I stood and adjusted my shirt in the mirror. “You need to go back to Washington, B. You need to focus on your studies, and I need to deal with this situation on my own.”
“I’m not leaving you alone,” Birdie argued.
“You have to,” I told her. “If you love me, then you will let me do this on my own.”