“This wasn’t you.” He tugged his hands away and tucked them at his sides. “Not all you,” he amended, because he was still pissed the hell off and she was there, so she was going to have to take part of his fury, even if it wasn’t right. “Mostly not you.”
“What then?” Her voice wavered tears intermingled with her words.
“It’s Mom.” He turned to stare at the lights twinkling in the distance. They really did look like stars in an inverse night sky. “She’s dying.”
CHAPTER 9
Alix
“Dying?” Alix gasped. She watched a tremor rip through Ross. “What do you mean?” When he didn’t answer her, she put her hands on his shoulders and shook him. Hard. She stared into his face so that it was impossible for him to look away. “Ross? What are you talking about?”
He shook his head and she dropped her hands and leaned back on her bottom. She tucked up against the metal wall away from the spot Ross had just tried to punch a hole through. That water tower was the first thing in her life that she’d seen Ross not be able to plow right through.
“Two years ago, she found a lump in her left breast. She had breast cancer.”
“What? No! I- what? No one told me that!”
“No one knew.” Ross’s voice was vacant, lost, like he wasn’t really there at all. “No one except your mom. She’s my mom’s best friend. Your dad doesn’t know. Chance doesn’t know. Mom is proud. She didn’t want to lose her independence. She didn’t want to just be seen as a cancer patient.”
“But I- I saw her- at the party. She looked… fine.”
“She was fine. And she’s good at hiding things. There’s makeup, wigs… she had a double mastectomy, as prevention, since they thought the cancer could spread. We told everyone that she and my dad took a two-month trip to the Maldives.”
“I remember that,” Alix gasped. “I mean, my mom wrote me something about that. Over text. It was jumbled up with a bunch of other stuff. I was coming home for break. I think she didn’t want me to ask her questions in person about where you guys were, not that I would have, because I was trying to avoid you, since I’d see right through her.”
“Yeah.” Ross turned his face away, back to studying the lights in the distance. It felt like they were a hundred miles away, even though it was just a few short miles back into the better illuminated parts of the city. “Probably.”
Alix resisted the urge to shake Ross again. She wanted him to tell her everything, but what right did she have to his personal information? She’d done her best to avoid him for four years. He owed her nothing. He went on anyway, his need to tell someone, to open up, greater than his need to despise her at the moment.
“She did treatment after. It was really hard on her. She went into remission though. She was cancer free for the past two years. Her hair never really grew back. She still wears a wig. Her skin is frail now, her nails brittle, but you wouldn’t be able to tell any of that from looking at her. She started feeling really tired last week, then she spiked a fever. She never said anything to me, but dad took her to the doctor. They did some tests. It’s back. It’s in her lymph nodes.”
“Where?” Alix asked desperately. She wanted Ross to turn to her and tell her he was freaking kidding. That he was just trying to get a sick rise out of her. Of course, he wasn’t. No one joked about things like that.
“I don’t know. Lymph nodes are all over. Her neck. Her armpits. Her chest. It’s not good. She’s going in for chemo in a few days. They’re going to blast her with seven rounds and then do six rounds of radiation and see where she’s at, but she was upfront when she told me this evening. Even with the treatment, it’s not good.”
Alix was glad she was both sitting down and leaning against something to support her. She knew she would have wilted right over otherwise, just melted, slithering along the ground like a boneless mess.
She imagined Evelyn. Bright, vital Evelyn who was always laughing about this or that. She was a nice person, truly. She had one of those hearts that was so big, there was always room for one more. One more charity, one more cause, one more person to love. She’d been like a second mom growing up. Ross was right, the Rivers’s had watched her and Chance more times than she could count while her parents were away. Their home was a second home. It was somewhere she’d always felt safe. Wanted. Cherished. Loved.