Page 22 of Take Me Back
By the time I finish, my breath comes in strangled sobs. “I miss her so much.”
Dane slides up the bed and wraps both arms around me, pulling me against his chest. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“I should’ve been there more for her, but if I didn’t go to work, then we couldn’t pay for her care. Insurance would only cover so much, and I wanted her to have the best. She gave me everything, and it was my turn to give it back to her. It might have been different if my dad hadn’t walked out on her.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because thinking about it nearly breaks me every time,” I say as Dane holds both my cheeks and catches more tears on his thumbs. “She didn’t want me to work so hard. She hated being a burden, but she wasn’t. She was mymom.Some days I think she willed it to go faster so I didn’t have to watch her suffer for longer. I held her hand when she passed, and I wanted to die too.”
Those months were such a blur, except for the day when we laid her in the ground and Benjie wrapped me in his arms.“You have to live for her now, Kitty Kat. She would want you to.”
“Benjie made me realize that acting like I was buried with her would just piss Mom off. So I went back to work. I went through the motions. I had to live because she couldn’t. He made me. And by the time I met you, I’d gotten really good at faking it. So good that I even believed it myself. I stopped talking about her, and I hate that too.”
“I wish you’d told me. This isn’t something you should’ve had to carry alone.”
Dane holds me tighter and I suck in a breath, knowing it’s time to tell him the part that haunts me every day.
“There’s still more.”
“Kat—”
“I haven’t been tested.”
Dane’s head jerks back, and his brown eyes search my face. “Why would you need to be tested?”
I hiccup and get ready to put my greatest fear into words. “I could have it too. ALS can be genetic. Every time my hand shakes, I tell myself I’m a coward for not getting tested, but I don’t know if I can live knowing that I’m going to die that way. So instead, I started this all on a lie. Everything. And I never told you. I just kept it going.”
Dane’s arms flex, and he tucks me into his chest again. “It wasn’t a lie. None of it. You were dealing the only way you knew how. There’s not a damn thing wrong with that. Whatever happens next, we face it together.”
I cling to him like he’s a rock in the ocean and I’m being battered by waves. The rock I wouldn’t let him be when I needed him most.
The days after Benjie died without telling anyone he had cancer.
Chapter 9
Dane
I’m a fucking fraud. My wife is baring her soul by sharing her secrets, except they aren’t secrets. I know all of it. About her piece-of-shit dad, the painful decline of her mother, and how Kat shouldered the whole thing.
The only thing I didn’t know, and I could kill him myself for not telling either of us, was that Benjie was dying. I should have seen it. I should have known something was wrong the day he tracked me down at the bar a few blocks from our apartment while I was waiting for Kat.
* * *
One year and two months ago
I ordered a Crown and Coke as I waited for Kat, knowing she was going to be at least fifteen minutes late. I called itKat time,and since I knew she was probably at the office still answering one more e-mail, I wasn’t going to hold it against her. After ten months of our unconventional marriage, with both of us traveling more than we were home, I finally had her mostly figured out.
Or so I thought.
“Hey, Dane. Kat mentioned she was meeting you here for drinks before going to dinner tonight.”
Benjie, my wife’s best friend, dropped onto the stool next to me. It was August in Texas, and he should be dying of heatstroke in that pink button-down shirt, but that was Benjie for you. Didn’t exactly adhere to any trend that I’d noticed in our limited interaction.
“What brings you around?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
The bartender slid the Crown and Coke across the wooden bar, and I nodded at Benjie. “You want anything?”
