“Some women use cancer as an excuse to stop trying.” He said it casually over breakfast while I was sick for the ninth day in a row, and I only said, “Okay.” Eleven months later, his own mother pulled me aside at a family dinner and asked me one question I wasn’t prepared for.
She asked whether he had always spoken to me that way. I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do, but she didn’t laugh back. Then she told me she’d heard something from him that made her realize I wasn’t telling anyone how bad things had become. She reached into her purse and handed me a folded piece of paper.
I opened it and recognized his handwriting immediately. It was a note he’d written months earlier, and the first sentence made my stomach drop. His mother had been keeping it because she wanted me to see it only when I was ready to leave. Then she told me what he had said to her the night he wrote it, and suddenly I understood why she had waited eleven months to ask me that question…
