13
I drank.
There were two bottles of wine in my fridge when disaster struck, but I ended up tipping them both down the sink. One was an Argentinean Malbec, and I don’t remember the other, but they were both ones he enjoyed. After I’d done that – narrowly resisting the urge to smash them on the kitchen tiles to relieve my feelings – I took the bottles to the supermarket recycling bin, because I couldn’t stand to even have the labels hidden out of sight in my own recycling bin. I think on some level I also forced myself out of the house because it was the only way I was going to stop crying. Nothing forced you to stop crying faster than the grim prospect of a stranger asking you if you were all right.
I remember wandering around Sainsbury’s on the bright, jagged edge of catastrophe, a place where colours were too loud and every noise sent shudders through me like the deep, wincing pain of an abscessed tooth. Some detached part of my brain was whispering that I was much, much worse than I’d been when I broke up with Gareth or Olivier. This was bigger and badder and harder than both of them put together, and wasn’t that stupid of me, because it had barely been six weeks. A school holiday’s worth. I was like a child who imagined you could form a lifelong love in the space of a few sunny weeks in August. I was no better than I’d been when I was in the lower sixth form, when I’d sat up late at night writing gasping, derivative love letters to Jason Byrne, who was in the upper sixth and played the drums in a local rock band. And then every morning I’d crawl out of bed, look at last night’s scrawlings and quietly shred them into the compost bin where the squirming worms and the reek of rot would keep the fragments safe from even my sister’s nosiest impulses.
I avoided the news. I was done with party conferences and had no inclination to watch Derek make his conference speech. I had so little appetite for politics that I didn’t send that email to Virginia. So what if my brief and crappy career as a political reporter was over? Just the thought of it was enough to make me feel sick. The most I could stand was stirring from my steady haze of gin and tonics long enough to wave an eyeball over my Twitter timeline to register which world leader Donald Trump had insulted today, and I was so far gone that I almost looked at him fondly. Why shouldn’t an orange monstrosity with the impulse control of a toddler be the most powerful person in the world? It fit. This was the wrong timeline. We were so deep into it that I may as well have grown my beard out to hedge-sized Victorian patriarch proportions. There was no way I was ever getting back to the right timeline.
For the first couple of days I watched the phone obsessively, but it was like waiting for someone to turn up after they’d gone missing. For those first forty-eight hours there was hope, the chance that the person might turn up alive and well, but after forty-eight hours you started hedging into the realms of grim statistics. And by seventy-two hours it was becoming more and more likely that you were now looking for a body.
And it was dead. No question about that. Derek had pulled the plug on it, just like that.
I told myself that he’d never really loved me. Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps he’d been right about how losing his father so young had broken something in him, left him this ‘weird cold monster child’, as he’d said. I told myself he didn’t experience love in the same way as normal people. He moved through life with the usual detachment of all politicians, where everything was either a statistic, a photo opportunity or a means to score points over the opposition. He was shallow, I decided. I’d been something he’d had his eye on for some time, a boyfriend brainy enough to confirm his intellect but not enough to overshadow him. And not too buff, either, because that would make him look vapid and obsessed with looks. My lovehandles and self-doubt fit the bill nicely and lent weight to his LGBT talking points, or at least until he’d realised that being a couple meant encountering the kind of real feelings he didn’t understand.
I hated him, because every time I let myself remember – even for a second – how much I actually loved him it was like staring into a void. All my memories of him were full of colour – his pink tie, his rainbow socks, green and yellow macarons, red wine and the pale Wedgewood blue of the ballroom at Bath – but the emptiness without him was blank and grey. A formless, flavourless nothing, stretching on forever.
Eventually, sick of my excuses and my monotone insistences that I was fine, Cerys came round to examine the damage with her own eyes. There was quite a lot to look at by that point. There were dirty dishes piled up on the coffee table, and the kitchen smelled suspiciously of wine. When she went to hug me I pulled away, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d showered.
“Have you seen the papers?” she said, fishing in her bag.
“Nope. Why?” When I said ‘why?’ I actually meant ‘why the fuck would I even bother, since everything is awful and everything I read will only upset me more?’ but Cerys didn’t speak my own homemade grunt language that well. She assumed I was asking about what was in them, and was already fiddling with her tablet.
“Here,” she said, handing it to me. I saw the Daily Mail logo on the screen and gagged.
The headline was THE HEARTBREAKING TRUTH ABOUT GAY LONER MP and the picture was one of Derek walking alone in St James’s Park, head bent against the wind. I felt a sudden burning wave of protectiveness towards him, made worse when I skimmed as much as the article as I could stand without going full Hulk. It had the smug, pearl-clutchy tone that made these kind of tabloid hitpieces somehow twice as disgusting as the red top ones. It made unpleasant allusions to Derek’s family history of mental illness and I knew before I’d even read the byline who was responsible for this effusion of honey and slime.
“Your little friend from Eastbourne,” said Cerys.
I handed back the tablet and took a deep breath. “Fuck. Her.”
“I don’t know what you were expecting from a Daily Mailite, but there you go,” said Cerys. “She’s pond scum.”
So there it was. I’d ruined my life over pond scum. Bits of that article kept coming back to me. In print Jacinta had a gift for insinuation that she lacked entirely in person; while she’d never actually said there had been question marks surrounding Derek’s mother’s death, she’d managed to allude to said question marks all the same. And the heart of Derek’s ‘tragic story’ was the faint, grimy whisper that he was probably so very, very sad because he wasn’t normal. He was gay, after all, and although they had parades and marriages and children nowadays, Jacinta – and all the readers of the good old fashioned, common-sense Daily Mail – knew that these things were just sops to us poor tragic gays. We smothered ourselves in glitter to hide our heartache, because deep down we wished we could be straight.
I think I preferred outright homophobia to the Daily Mail’s greasy concern-troll version.
“Have you seen him?” I said, moving junk off the sofa. Cerys didn’t sit down. I didn’t entirely blame her. I’d slid into absolute squalor. For days now all I’d done was eat, drink, sleep and bury myself in that sci-fi novel I’d dusted off in the wake of Eastbourne. It was stupid and meandering and – I suspected – not very good, but right now it was the only thing that made me feel remotely normal.
Cerys looked guarded. She started to sing her old song, the one about not being able to talk about her clients, but I shut her down with a look, and she sighed.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve seen him. He’s in a bad way.”
“Good. Serves him right for dumping me.”
“I know you don’t mean that.”
It was my turn to sigh. “It’s over, Cerys. What am I supposed to do? He doesn’t want me. He made that very clear. He even did the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ at one point.”
She shook her head and started to gather up the plates on the coffee table.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Cleaning up.”
“That’s sort of rude,” I said, following her into the kitchen, where she was already rolling up her sleeves. “How do you know I don’t like it like this?”
“Because you don’t,” she said, emptying the greasy water in the washing up bowl. “You’re wallowing, Toby. You’re not looking after yourself.”
“Is there a point?” I said.
She gave me a worried look, and I realised how that had sounded.
“I’m not going to off myself or anything,” I said. “This is why I didn’t want to do this. This is exactly why I never wanted to fall in love with him, because I don’t do heartbreak. I just go to pieces, every fucking time.”
“So it’s love?” she said, squirting Fairy Liquid into the sink. A bunch of small bubbles burst from the nozzle as she set it down, and they glinted in the sunlight around her, making her look like some creature who had the power to grant wishes, or punish you for not paying attention to the things that were really important.
“It was.” Past tense, because it had to be. “And you don’t need to tell me it’s too fast and that it’s stupid, because I know it is.”
“I wasn’t going to say that at all.”
I picked up a teatowel, thinking I should do something if she was going to swing by and do all my washing up. “It wasn’t fair,” I said.
“What wasn’t?”
“Him. Us. All of it. I didn’t stand a chance; he was so funny and clever and sexy. How is that fair?” I hadn’t spoken about this to anyone until now, and the words came pouring out of me. “He cooked me dinner and bought me flowers and took me to his incredibly posh friends’ wedding like we were a real couple. How was I supposed to resist? He told me he wanted me even more than he wanted to be prime minister.” I was crying now, and Cerys dried her hands. But I was still going. “What the hell is he fucking playing at? He were perfect, Cerys. I love him so much that every time I think about him it hurts. How am I even supposed to function with this pain inside me? The worst thing is that I don’t even want it to go away, because if it dims it means I’ve stopped loving him as much, and if I stop loving him I think my life…oh God. My life is so fucking empty. It feels like all I have is this hurt.”
She sighed. “Oh, Lovey,” she said, and put her arms around me, kind enough not to mention how terrible I smelled. I cried and cried, so helpless and babylike that she – who always had a tune in her head one way or another – started to hum softly to soothe me. I made out the tune – La Vie En Rose – and almost started wailing out loud again, but I managed to get a grip of myself and forced myself not to think of all the shades of pink I was now missing out. Of ties and wine and the gorgeous, glowing colour of his lips when he’d been kissed long and hard and rubbed against my beard.
“Maybe you should see someone,” Cerys said, as we peeled apart.
“What? A therapist?”
She ran her fingers down my bare arm, her nails scratching gently, suggestively. “A professional,” she said, in a guarded, flirtatious way I’d never seen before.
“Wait,” I said, totally confused. “Are you…are hitting on me?”
She gave a small laugh. “No. I’m just saying. Sometimes it can be therapeutic to bring all that pain out to the surface. In a more…physical way.”
As soon as she said it I wanted it. I remembered how freeing it had felt to scream and sob after that minor spat we’d had the other Friday morning. And how light and cool and assured I’d felt afterwards. Yes. Get it all out in the dungeon, if only to clear my head and stop wallowing. Figure out a way to win him back.
“Okay,” I said, and she stiffened, surprised.
“What?” I said. “You thought you were going to have to work harder to convince me?”
“A bit, yes,” she said. “How does Wednesday suit you?”
“Wednesday? Yeah. I didn’t have anything scheduled, much beyond drinking, crying and pretending to write a book. Sounds fine.”
“Good,” said Cerys. “Everything’s going to be all right. You’ll see.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. And you’ll feel a damn sight better when you’ve cleaned this place up.” She tossed me the teatowel. “I’ll wash, you wipe.”
*
Back to the bondage dungeon.
It was scary how quickly I could see myself coming to need this. On the train from Wandsworth to Victoria I had caught myself sitting braced, as if anticipating the pain. Almost looking forward to it, because I knew it would be satisfying somehow. Kind of like that time I’d let a friend talk me into getting my balls waxed: there was screaming involved, but the result was oddly pleasing.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” said Cerys, who had dressed – if not to kill – then at least to maim severely. She was wearing a sleek little black sheath with a houndstooth peplum jacket, her hair carefully curled and cascading over her shoulders. Her heels were so high that they gave her an inch on me, but everyone wore stripper-height heels these days, and she could just as easily have been one of the crop of new-minted MPs as a dominatrix.
“Circle line was hell,” I said. “There were about five different groups of tourists trying to pile on and off at Victoria. You look nice.”
That was my way of saying she didn’t look like a woman who was about to strip me, handcuff me face down to a bed and beat the shit out of me. That hairstyle didn’t look like it would hold up to even my kind of entry level S&M session.
“Come through,” she said, and opened the door to the dungeon.
Derek was inside.
He was sitting on one of the white leather couches at the opposite end from the huge white bed. He was obviously as surprised as I was, because he stood up when he saw me.
“Um, what?” he said, with a pointed glance at Cerys.
“Yeah, I second that,” I said.
Cerys was unrepentant. “You’re going to talk to each other,” she said, with a Mistressy tone made all the more terrifying by her heels, her hair and the snap in her large brown eyes. No wonder she’d dressed for business. She meant it.
“No,” said Derek. “I’m here because I specifically asked you to work me over with a bullwhip.”
“I’m diversifying,” said Cerys. “Moving into couples therapy. Sit down. I’ll bring you some tea.”
“Tea?” he said, and gave me one of those looks that Martin Freeman built his career on. It was a brief flash of our old rapport and I was scared at the things it did to my heart. I’d thought I’d perked up a bit over the last few days, but the devastation came tumbling back onto me. I loved him. I loved him desperately and all I wanted to do right now was ask him what the hell he was thinking. A bullwhip, for Christ’s sake?
But the moment had passed. He was stiff and embarrassed once more, although I was strangely gratified to see he looked like he’d lost some weight. He hadn’t had much to lose in the first place and it had left his cheeks hollow. He was wearing his blue mohair suit, the one he’d worn in St James’s Park when he’d been sidestepping that monstrous looking pelican. I’d always loved the way that suit fitted him, hugging the cheeks of his narrow arse and flattering his long, runner’s thighs. Now it hung a little loose and I was glad to see it. If I’d been suffering, so had he.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had no idea she was going to do this.”
He sat down. “Really? What were you here for?”
I took a seat in the armchair opposite. “Something with paddles, probably,” I said. “Wasn’t going to attempt the bullwhip. I’m not that hardcore.”
He must have thought I was joking, because his eyebrows went up. “Wait. You were here for…that?”
I shrugged. “Seems like I have a taste for it.”
The side door opened and Cerys clopped back in with a tea tray. She set it down on the coffee table and smiled. “There you go,” she said. “Do you take sugar? I couldn’t remember if you did. Anyway, there’s a bowl there. And some biscuits.”
“Thank you…?” I said.
“Don’t mention it,” she said, and left.
We sat there in a silence made all the more awkward by the fact that I couldn’t remember us ever being this way. From that first long, playful conversation in the Arse End it seemed like we’d done nothing but talk. Even in bed we chattered like we were at a sleepover party. We’d talked about dinosaurs and civil wars and which Jane Austen hero would be willing to roleplay a sex robot for his wife. How was it possible that two people who talked so much suddenly couldn’t seem to communicate?
“So…” he said. “This is…um…”
“Yes.”
Again, Emily Post was letting me down. There was nothing in any edition about having tea and biscuits in a bondage dungeon. Or what to do when you were sitting across from an ex who you still loved so much that you could hardly see straight. That blue suit had always brought out the red in his hair, and against that white background he was fire.
He looked at me, and I looked at him, and there were a million things I wanted to say, but the hurt was still fresh and deep.
“So,” he said, starting again. “I…um…I looked up that French king you were talking about, by the way.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I went along with it.
“The one who went so mad he thought he was made of glass,” he said. “Rang a bell, but I couldn’t remember his name.”
“Oh? And what was his name?” I didn’t care, but I’d talk about this rather than never talk to him again.
“Charles the Mad.”
“Accurate,” I said. “If harsh.”
He gave a weak smile, a pale echo of his old delight whenever I said something that amused him. “Funny how the French had soubriquets for so many of their monarchs,” he said. “But we never went in for it in this country.”
I said nothing, curious as to where he was going with this. When he talked he had a way of making you listen, which was one of the many reasons why the government dreaded the prospect of him in a leadership election.
“All those Henries and Georges and Edwards who were just numbers,” he said. “If they’d been French they would have been Henry the Mad, Henry the Fat, Henry the Usurper. I think the only ones we ever tagged the French way were the Williams. William the Conquerer, William Rufus, William of Orange and…the other one. Was he just William IV? I think he was. Maybe he should have been William the Boring…”
“Derek,” I said, finally realising what he was doing, perhaps by reflex. He was filibustering. In a bondage dungeon. In order to avoid talking about our relationship.
He stopped and looked across at me. His eyes were too bright. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m talking bollocks, aren’t I?”
I ignored the question. “How are you?”
He seemed to sense this wasn’t just a pleasantry. “Awful,” he said.
“You were right,” I said. “About that Jacinta woman. I saw the article she wrote.”
Derek exhaled. “Right. About my family history of madness and suicide and how I’m probably going to off myself the same way one day?”
“You were right all along. She’s a lying piece of shit.”
He chewed on his bottom lip. “She’s a piece of shit,” he said, deliberately emphasising what he wasn’t saying.
I stared at him. “Derek, what are you talking about? Are you planning on hurting yourself? Because if you are…”
He shook his head.
“Sue the bitch,” I said. “You have every right to. She more or less said your mother killed herself, and we both know that’s not true. There was no inquest.”
Derek sat in silence, one that said more than words could say. What the hell had he been hiding from me? I got up from the armchair, unable to sit there and see him alone on that huge sofa for a moment longer. I sat beside him, our knees touching.
“The official explanation was that she died of heart failure,” he said. “But I know my mother. She never did a thing in her life without meaning to, and I don’t imagine dying was any different.”
I could feel him shaking and I was furious over that article, partly furious with him. It must have caused him so much distress and he’d chosen to suffer to silence, away from me, for reasons I couldn’t yet grasp. I ran my hand over his hair and he swayed slightly towards me, and all I wanted to do was to kiss him and tell him how I loved him and that nothing could ever truly hurt us as long as we loved one another. “Talk to me,” I said.
He gave a long, slow sigh. “Remember how I told you how it started with those absence seizures?” he said. “Well, it progressed. Fast. I think maybe she’d been hiding it for a while, because it wasn’t even three years before it took everything from her. It felt like every single week there was something new. Little things you take for granted, like typing. I remember when I was growing up, she clung to her typewriter long past the point where everyone had started using computers. ‘I know where I am with it,’ she’d say, and I’d point out over and over again that the QUERTY keyboard was exactly the same on a computer, but she wouldn’t have it. She typed up all her books and papers on this crusty old machine. I mean, the keys kept flying off all the time. She always kept a tube of Superglue in her desk drawer for running repairs. I think Windows 98 was out by the time she finally admitted it was time to let the thing die. We joked about giving it a Viking funeral – taking it down to the beach and pushing it out to sea in a flaming canoe or something – and I must admit I ended up noticing its absence when it was gone. That machine gun rattle of her fingers on the keys; it had been the soundtrack of my childhood. She’d been so fast, Toby. Almost as fast as her brain. And then one day I noticed she was slowing down, and that scared the piss out of me.”
He sniffed and blinked back tears. I held his hand.
“I don’t know when it happened,” he said. “But somewhere between the time I realised that and the next time I saw her behind a keyboard, she’d started typing with two fingers. It was so fast. So aggressive. So fucking cruel.”
Derek took a breath and continued. “She started having these blank moments. The first time, when I saw this…this nothing in her eyes, I had to leave the room afterwards. I couldn’t let her see how upset it made me. How scared.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “And they just kept on coming, more and more often, just like how that typewriter lost its keys more frequently towards the end, like it had been waiting to fall apart for years. Another key that you could no longer strike. Another connection lost. The blank spaces got longer, until that one terrible day when she looked into my eyes and I could tell she no longer had any idea who I was.”
I put my arm around his waist and he leaned into me. “I’m so sorry,” I said, because everything else I wanted to say was not what he wanted to hear right now. I was furious and protective and I wanted to take him far away from Westminster where he’d never have to be reminded of past pain, just because some slimy hack wanted to sell some more papers.
“Shortly after that she stopped eating,” he said. “She’d tied it all up nice and tight before the illness took her. Earlier I’d tried to persuade her to sign over power of attorney, but she’d said no, and the worse she got the uglier it felt to try and persuade her. ‘I’m going on my own terms,’ she said. ‘And that’s all there is to it.’ I didn’t know she’d made an advanced decision until it was too late, but there was nothing I could do. It was all legal. She’d made the decision to refuse CPR, artificial feeding, anything that might prolong her life artificially, basically.”
“Oh my God,” I said, imagining him alone in some hospital. No father, no siblings. Just him and his grief. I brushed his hair back from his forehead and kissed the corner of his eye. It tasted of tears, and his grip was almost crushing my hand.
“I panicked,” he said. “I wasn’t fucking ready to lose her. The whole past two or three years had felt like a nightmare, just one thing cascading on top of the next. And I was trying to get through to her, trying to make her see sense, until I found myself screaming at her. Do you want to die? Is that what you want? Do you really want to die?” He swallowed a sob, his voice cracking. “And she looked at me, Toby. Really looked at me, for the first time in a long time. The way she hadn’t since the blank spaces started. That person looking back at me – that was wholly my mother, and she looked at me. She looked me right in the eye and she said yes.
“She died that night. Heart failure. She was so weak from starving herself that her heart gave out. And she meant it to happen. There was no inquest, no pills, no razor blades, no rope, but I know that she killed herself.”
He started to sob, and that was when I knew I hadn’t been dreaming that night when I woke up and heard him crying, because he sounded exactly the same. And it all made sense now. The hospital, the brain injury, all the horrors it must have brought back for him, and he’d insisted he’d been fine and that I was just being overprotective and neurotic.
I held him as he cried, furious with Jacinta and that whole greasy tabloid culture. To them it was just entertainment, but to him it was his worst nightmare, revived and hauled over the coals for clicks and page views. How long had he been hurting like this?
“You can talk to me,” I said, wiping his tears with my hands. “You can always talk to me. Jesus, Derek – why didn’t you call me?”
He snuffled and shook his head. “Because I dumped you. I didn’t think you’d want to hear from me.”
“Are you mad? All I wanted was to hear from you. Together, apart – it doesn’t matter. As long as I know you’re okay.”
He caught his breath in a sob. “Oh God,” he said, his forehead pressed against mine. “You really do love me, don’t you?”
“Yes. More than anything. I love you so much.”
I kissed his closed lips and felt the tension in them, as if he wanted to open his mouth to me but was holding back for some reason. “No,” he said, and cupped my face in his hands. “Listen to me, Toby – please. I have to tell you this now.”
“What? What is it?”
“The form of Alzheimer’s that my mother had,” he said. “It’s rare, it’s aggressive and it’s genetic. I could have as few as ten good years left in me.”
“I’ll take them,” I said. I was crying, too. “All I fucking want is you.”
This time he kissed me back. It was wet and salty and sloppy, but it was the sweetest kiss I’d ever had.
“I’m so scared,” he said.
“I know. But it’s okay.”
He shook his head and dried his eyes. “No. It’s not,” he said. “When I had the accident…” He paused to compose himself and I was afraid of what he was going to say next. “They found a shadow on my brain.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?” I said, barely concealing my frustration.
“Because I love you,” he said. “Because you took such good care of me, and the more protective you got the more I thought I couldn’t stand it.”
“Stand what?”
“The thought of you one day looking at me the way I found myself looking at her towards the end. Having to leave the room so she couldn’t see how much the changes distressed me. Thinking that one day I might end up putting you through so much pain.”
I sighed and kissed his forehead. “I told you – if we have ten years I will take ten years. And we’ll make them amazing.”
He raised his head to look at me. “And then what, Lamb? What happens after that? All that love. All those memories. All it takes is a couple of holes in the wrong places in my brain and that’s it. They’re gone.”
“No,” I said. “They’re not gone. Any more than your mother is gone. She was your mother – the person who teaches you how to love in the first place. And she might have died, but you’re still here, and that love you learned from her is still here, and because you passed it on to me I’m part of it now. Love’s like energy – it doesn’t die. It just…changes form.”
Derek stifled a small sob. He was breathing hard and I could feel him tremble, but when he looked up at me I knew I’d won. “You are perfect,” he said, kissing my lips. “I love you so much.”
“And I love you,” I said, starting to cry again. Had this dungeon ever seen such a couple of cry-babies before? “I can’t stand the thought of throwing all of this away.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you. I should have trusted that you wouldn’t run off.”
I dried my eyes again. “No more secrets, okay?”
“Absolutely.”
“And please don’t tell me you were serious about the bullwhip?”
He looked up with a flash of his old lunacy. “I fucking am,” he said. “If I only have ten years then I’m going to live every minute of them.”
“You keep saying that. Ten years. Is that…is that the prognosis?”
He shrugged and blew his nose. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Symptoms can start as early as the late thirties,” he said. “I could be going downhill already. All because of one fucked gene.” He took a deep breath and when he started talking he didn’t look at me. “They call it posterior cortical atrophy, I think. It’s when you start having difficulty judging speed. And distance. And getting into car accidents.”
“There was a fox,” I said.
He shook his head. “I’ve been forgetting things lately. Phone calls. Appointments. Sonnets. Where I put the cheese grater.”
“Everyone does that,” I said, taking his hand. “Look, if it’s genetic, isn’t there some test you can do?”
Derek sighed heavily. “Yeah,” he said. “I haven’t taken it.”
“You…” I was frustrated and relieved all at once. “You haven’t taken it?”
“No. Obviously it’s come up in the past. I had a lot of conversations with doctors and psychiatrists about what it would mean to take it, but I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to know.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I mean, my mother had just died and I was in no mental shape to deal with that. How do you do that? How do you come face to face with your own expiration date like that?”
“I can’t imagine it’s easy.”
He exhaled, his shoulders slumping. “It’s not, but I’m starting to think I might have to do it.”
“Take the test?”
“Yes. Even though I’m scared out of my fucking mind.”
I squeezed his hand. “I know, sweetheart. But I’m here. I’ll always be here.”
His eyes started to fill once more. “I believe that.”
“You should,” I said. “Because I’m not going anywhere.”