Page 148 of Forget Me Not

“I do.”

“No!” I snap and she goes silent for a moment. My heart rages in my chest, my head spinning. Jack was there. He told me to get out. “I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“No,” she says gently. “Things happen and maybe he was there, just not in the way you think. Either way, you need to stop living with this guilt. He was gone before the car sank and there isn’t a single thing you can do about it. Jack knew he didn’t have much time left.”

I pause, my lungs feeling like glass on the precipice of breaking.

My mind has always been foggy about that night. I swear Jack was looking at me, forcing me to get out of my seat belt and slip out of the window.

I know what I saw.

“What did you say?” I ask quietly, my voice barely above a whisper.

“Nova, I’m so sorry. I should have told you sooner . . .”

“Told me what sooner?”

I can hear her weeping into the phone, but all I can focus on is what she said.

“Tell me!” I yell, losing my patience and sitting upright on the couch. Toast and Creamsicle both jump when I raise my voice, looking back at me, scared and confused.

“Jack—” she starts, her tears making it harder to get the words out. “He had a brain tumor. Cancerous. One of the most aggressive types. They didn’t find it until it was so well-developed because he refused to go see a doctor until he passed out at work one day. That’s when we found out.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” My chest constricts painfully as my brain struggles to process the information. He took his mother. He trusted her with the information.

“He made me swear not to. Nova, he loved you. So much more than I understood at the time. He didn’t want to ruin the time you had left.”

“How long before he died did he find out about the cancer?”

“Six months. The doctors gave him a year, a year and a half, at the most, to live.”

“Is that why he . . .” I start, but my voice trails off, ending on nothing. She knows what I’m talking about. The first time Jack ever slapped me, I called her. She told me to watch what I say to him. That he’s not in charge of his emotions right now.

Suddenly, all the fights, all the times he yelled at me, called me names . . . It makes sense. His headaches, his vomiting in the morning when he thought I couldn’t hear him. Those violent tendencies took the forefront in his brain when he started to die.

“Oh my God,” I breathe, covering my mouth with my hands. Across the room, our wedding photo is on the mantle and Jack’s face is smiling back at me, bright as ever.

“Yes. The cancer made him mean.” She sucks in a deep breath and I pick up my wine bottle, finishing the last of it. “I can’t make excuses for anything he did, Nova. Cancer doesn’t excuse it all. He wasn’t a good husband to you. I can, however, give you his apology.”

“What?”

“I mailed you a letter he wrote to you. About two weeks ago. You should have gotten it by now.”

I glance at the stack of unopened mail on the kitchen table.

“Just . . . Know I regret not sending it to you sooner. And I’m sorry I wallowed in my own self-pity. I just . . . wanted someone else to hurt like I was.”

I open my mouth to thank her, but she doesn’t deserve it. I feel like the world is crashing down on me and there’s no Atlas to hold it up. Just me fighting through the rubble alone.

There’s nothing to say. At the end of the day, she has to live with the burden of knowing she kept this from me. Four years, I wondered. Four years I fought with myself as to why he would save me and not himself.

I guess the answers were there all along. My mind just couldn’t process them.

“Goodbye, Nova.”

Anne hangs up the phone without another word and I toss it to the couch beside me and leap for the dining room table. I toss bills, junk mail, and coupons aside until I stumble across a single envelope, Anne’s sprawling cursive written on the surface.

I don’t pause before ripping it open. I know if I do that, I’ll only put it off for another day.

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