He smiled even though it didn’t erase the melancholy in his eyes. “We’re having a girl, Della.” His gaze travelled down my exposed breasts to my flat belly. “We made one. Today.”
Goosebumps sprouted over my arms. “Could it happen that quick?”
He pulled me back down onto him, our shared heat slightly sticky and too hot, but I had no intention of leaving his side.
We’d calmed from our orgasms and separated enough to lie side by side until Ren gathered me to spoon against him as if he needed me to touch him at all times.
“After the short straw I’ve been dealt, we better have made a baby today. I think I deserve that much.” He narrowed his eyes at the tent roof. “Hear me? Whoever you are? Impregnate this girl if you feel a shred of guilt for what you’ve done to me.”
Tears stung my eyes all over again.
I’d forgotten how much I’d cried in the past week, and I’d only shed more because we’d been avoiding the monster in the room.
The monster we came into the forest to face.
How long?
But before we did, I wanted to exist in light-hearted baby planning a little longer. “Okay, say I’m pregnant. Say you have magical sperm, and bam, I’m knocked up—out of wedlock, no less.” I tapped his chin, making him chuckle. “Say all of that happened? Well, I’m telling you, I’m having a boy.”
“Why do you want a boy so badly?”
“Because I want another you.”
He sucked in a breath.
The comment was meant to be blasé, but no truer words had been spoken. I wanted another Ren to replace the one who was dying. I wanted Ren to somehow clone himself, heal himself, and never die—not until he was one-hundred-and-two and ready.
Our joking bled away.
We sighed heavily with no small amount of misery.
Oppressive silence smothered us, and we made no move to lighten it.
Exhaustion spread over me even though it was still light outside. I felt as if I’d run every marathon there ever was and still had so many to go.
I suffered no anger anymore. No rage or fury.
Just heart-weary desolation.
I didn’t know how much time passed, but Ren squeezed me, rousing me from a strange, stressful doze. “Jacob.”
“Huh?”
“If you’re pregnant with my son. I want to call him Jacob.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I just like the name. It feels…right.”
My heart splashed into my stomach, annihilated by acid and circumstance. “Okay, Ren. I can live with Jacob.”
He gave me the sweetest kiss, his lungs inhaling and exhaling with a gentle cough.
A cough that couldn’t be ignored anymore.
We tensed, once again on the same tattered wavelength.
“Della…”
“Ren…”
We spoke together and stopped together.
“You go,” I whispered.
He flinched. “I don’t know what to say. You’ve guessed the hardest part.”
“I didn’t guess. I overhead you. On the phone in the stable.” My voice wobbled. “You asked how long. I knew we didn’t have a lot of time.”
“Shit.” He kissed my forehead. “And you dealt with this for a week on your own?”
I brushed his concern away. “It’s nothing compared to you. When did you find out?”
His tone strained. “Does it matter?”
“No.” I burrowed into him. “Nothing matters now.”
“I’m so sorry, Della.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t apologise for something that isn’t your fault.”
“But how can I not? How can I not hate myself for what—”
“Stop, Ren.” Every muscle clenched. “Just tell me. Tell me what’s wrong with you.”
He froze, his heart racing against me. “I’ve had it for twenty years.”
I squeezed my eyes as if that would protect me from goblins.
“At Mclary’s. I was put at risk…”
I wanted to tell him to stop, to never tell me, to laugh this awfulness away. But I nodded and held on with all my strength.
“You’ll need to be tested too—just in case. But I’m hoping you weren’t exposed like I was.”
“Exposed to what?” I wanted to go deaf, to never listen to what devil hurt my love, but instead, my ears rang…waiting for his answer. And even though I knew it was coming. Even though I’d heard it in my head and watched it happen over and over in my nightmares, it still had the power to change my world.
To change me as a person.
To strip aside my remaining youth and make me so much older than I ever wanted to be.
“Asbestos poisoning.” He swallowed hard, his chest working. “I have stage one mesothelioma.”
I tried to speak, to be brave and ask questions, but I left him totally alone to explain.
A foreign word I didn’t know.
A title to a host of unrecognisable evil.
I was clueless.
I was shell-shocked.
I didn’t know myself anymore.
I only knew a canyon of vast quaking emptiness with a river of the roughest, churniest despair.
Ren swallowed again, chewing on tears. “I’ve had two treatments with a drug called Keytruda. It’s been proven in other studies to be very successful. Some even call it the miracle drug, and it doesn’t cause as many side effects as chemo.”