“You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“You let me think this whole trip was just for her. You let me sell my mother’s bracelet thinking I was doing it for one dying child, when I was doing it for two of you.”
His face broke then, the way I’d only seen it break once before, the night Amara’s doctor first said the word leukemia out loud in that office.
“I didn’t want you carrying both of us at the same time,” he said. “You’ve been carrying people alone since Darius died before you ever even got the chance to hold him. I couldn’t be one more weight you had to pick up by yourself. I wanted to give you five days where you only had to be strong for her.”
I wanted to be angrier than I was. I wanted to stay furious at him for the whole drive home, for every lie about insurance calls and hospice pamphlets, for every quiet moment on this trip I now understood he’d been living through as his own farewell while I thought I was only watching hers.
But I looked at him standing there in that parking lot, thinner than I’d let myself notice, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with double shifts, and I understood, underneath the hurt, exactly why he’d done it. Because that was who Andre had always been, from the very first summer he showed up in our lives and never once tried to take up more space than we offered him. Even dying, he was still trying to make himself smaller so the rest of us could have more room to hope in.
“We tell her together,” I finally said. “Not today. Not on the drive home, while she’s still got sand in her shoes and this whole trip fresh in her mind. But soon. And you don’t carry the rest of this by yourself either. Not one more day of it.”
He nodded, and for the first time in four months, I watched something in his shoulders let go, just slightly, like he’d been bracing for a blow that never came.
“There’s something else,” he said, before I could turn back toward the lobby. “Bettina’s coordinator, the one who set up the Legacy program — she told me about a support group back in Cedarhurst, for spouses in this exact situation. Facing two losses at once. I never called them. I didn’t think I deserved to sit in a room asking for help when I was the one keeping secrets from you.” He looked down at his hands. “I’ll call them now. Whenever you’re ready to go with me.”
“We’ll figure out the timing,” I said. “Together. That’s the only rule from here.”
