She nodded. "Not that everyone else would agree with you. It's so easy to dismiss a child's opinions. The grandparents I knew got very upset with me when I asked things like Why don't mommy and daddy love me? They had a very rosy view of their daughter, my mom. I'm glad in some ways they passed before the final proof came that would have changed even their minds."
"What happened?"
"I got leukemia when I was eight." Blythe sounded so prosaic saying those devasting words. "My nanny at the time insisted I see the doctor because of my lethargy and the flu that just never went away. I was always getting bruises."
Tor felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room.
Cancer could kill. It had killed his mother.
And that list of symptoms? Sounded way too familiar. Even though he'd been a small child when his mother was sick, Tor remembered how tired she'd always been, how her arms and legs were always marred with purple bruises from the slightest bumps.
He snared Blythe's sapphire gaze with his own. "You had cancer?"
"Yes." The confirmation was too matter of fact for what she was agreeing to.
Was Blythe in remission? She had to be. What was her long term prognosis? "Will it come back?"
She shook her head, silky brown waves swaying over her shoulders. "I've been cancer free since I was nine." She smiled then. "I beat it," she said with a very present sense of victory for that long ago crisis. "They consider you cured if you go ten years in remission. It has been eighteen years."
Relief washed through him, but he did not let it show. It was an out of proportion reaction to news from a family friend that her health was good.
"Do you blame your parents for not noticing you needed to go to the doctor?" he asked.
"No, of course not," she denied, looking at him like he'd lost his mind. "It's not a matter of blaming them for anything, but accepting the truth of our relationship."
"Which is?"
"We don't have one. I do not and have never mattered to them as a human being."
"That…I…" For once, he wasn't sure what to say.
"I was in and out of the hospital for nearly a year. Radiation and chemotherapy are hard. They hurt. They leave you feeling sick all the time. I was a child. I needed comfort."
"And they didn't comfort you?" He could not fathom that level of unconcern in a parent.
His father might have abdicated his role, but if Tor had ever been seriously ill, he knew the former king would have cared. He would have shown up at the hospital at the very least, but Tor still had enough memories of being tucked into bed by his father before he was eight to know that the man knew how to give comfort.
Just not when they'd both been grieving the loss of the same person.
"I barely saw them the entire time," Blythe said, like it was someone else's memory. Not a painful personal one. "They did not visit the hospital. They did not comfort me at night when I cried myself to sleep from the pain. They quite literally did not care whether I lived or died."
How could anyone not care whether this amazing woman lived, or died? Especially as a child. "No."
"Yes. I needed marrow stem cell replacement therapy. Both refused to even be tested for a match. Luckily for me, against the odds, there was a donor match in the database."
"They refused to be tested?" he asked with disbelief.
"Categorically."
He said an ugly word.
She nodded. "And in answer to whether or not they comforted me? No chance. They did not comfort me when I was terrified of the pain each new hospital visit would bring. Sure, my mom got a new charity to support to make her look good. My dad got the sick kid at home card when he didn't want to take a lateral transfer that meant moving to a smaller town."
"And you got the pain and the fear." He had the weirdest completely nonsexual urge to pull her into his arms.
"I had my nannies." Blythe shrugged, like this horror story wasn't any big deal. "Friends from school who supported me when and how they could, but until I met Janice, I never had someone in my life who would sacrifice their own comfort for my own."
Their food arrived, interrupting Blythe's story, but Tor was hooked.