Page 84 of One-Star Romance

They nestled in, their breath starting to sync, their chests rising and falling in tandem. As her eyes closed and she seemed to teeter on the edge of sleep, he wondered how much time had passed. For a moment he felt both that she’d been in his arms forever and not nearly long enough. And then, somehow, he fell into a grateful, dreamless sleep himself.

35

They woke in the gray early-morning light to say goodbye. As Angus loaded up the car, Natalie gripped Gabby’s trembling arms. She imagined that, with every press of her fingers, she was sending bits of her own strength and health into her friend, then wanted to cry because she knew it didn’t work that way. “You’re going to be okay,” she said, wishing she could make herself believe it.

Gabby tried to say something, then pressed her lips together as if to stop herself from weeping. Instead, she just nodded, rested her head on Nat’s shoulder for a moment, and walked out the door.

After their car disappeared down the street, Natalie realized that she’d buttoned her shirt all wrong, one button off.

A layer of dread clung to the surfaces around them like dust, stirred up into the air whenever they moved. Natalie’s anxiety was a hand clamped around her throat. She managed to put it somewhat to the side when Christina was awake, since Christina ran around with her usual energy and there was no choice but to follow her lead. Rob and Natalie played with her, their ears alert to any dings from their phones that might change the course of their futures.

Natalie almost wanted to laugh, remembering her twentysomething self relentlessly checking her email in hopes of a book deal. She’d thought waiting for that news was the most agonizing form of torture. What a lucky, naive girl she’d been.

Each time a text came in, Nat and Rob pulled their phones out with fumbling fingers. But it never told them what they wanted to know. It was always only Angus with the update that they were waiting to go into surgery, Angus checking in to say that the doctors had wheeled Gabby in and put her under, Angus letting them know that he didn’t know anything at all.

When bedtime came, Natalie and Rob both tucked Christina in, and Rob sat by her side, reading Christina multiple stories with all the patience in the world. He tried to do character voices, though he wasn’t very good at it, which was charming in its own way—a bunny speaking in a dry tone, a dump truck speaking in the same dry tone, just louder. Thank God he was here, a sturdy, steady anchor despite the anxiety that must be thrumming in him too.

“Another story,” Christina said, then frowned at Natalie. “Just Rob stays.”

Natalie raised her eyebrows at Rob, and he shrugged. “I see who wins the popularity contest here,” she said.

“Can’t help it that I’m immensely and universally likable,” he replied, and she actually managed the ghost of a laugh.

“I’ll leave you to it.” She slipped downstairs and stood in the kitchen, useless, unmoored.

Maybe she could tidy something to keep her hands busy. She turned around all the spices in the spice cabinet so that they were facing the exact same way, then went into the front hallway. The day’s mail had spilled onto the carpet from where the mailman had pushed it through the slot, and Natalie bent down to pick it up, sorting it into a neat pile to place on a nearby table. Mostly catalogs and junk.

But her hands stilled as she registered a small envelope, one that looked like it had been through the wringer, marked Return to Sender. An envelope with her name on it, in Gabby’s neat handwriting, along with an outdated LA address, the place she’d been living the last time she and Gabby had been on speaking terms.

Shaking, she slid the seal open, pulled out a letter, and began to read.

Dear Natalie,

I have cancer. I’m going to work up the courage to tell you before this letter makes its way to you, so I don’t need to go into details here. But I scheduled my surgery and mangled an entire box of tissues, and now I’m sitting in my bedroom writing letters to the people who are most important to me. Despite everything that’s happened between us recently, that list could never be complete without you.

I keep thinking about something you said during our fight—that you never mattered to me as much as I mattered to you. I hate that I made you feel that way. Please don’t think that you were someone with whom I was just killing time while I waited for “my person” to come along. You are my person too.

Sometimes I think about the alternate universe in which I met Angus later, and you and I had more time to live together in that crappy apartment. (I can say that now that we’ve both moved out of it, right? That place was a hellhole. And yet I remember it with immense love because you were there.) I’m very happy with my life. Well, except for the cancer of it all. But there would have been so much joy in that alternate universe too. So many more long talks about everything and nothing that went deep into the night, without either one of us having to worry about catching the subway home. So much more laughing until our stomachs hurt and exploring the city and trying new things, figuring out who we were together. I wish that, somehow, I could have had that and everything I have now (again, except for the cancer) or that ours was a world where it was normal to live in a commune with all the people you wanted to see every day.

I know that commune living probably isn’t for us. But if I make it through this, I hope that we can be in each other’s lives again in a more honest way than we’ve been in the past few years. I don’t want to keep shying away from difficult topics because they make us uncomfortable or because talking about them might be unpleasant. Our relationship is about so much more than pleasantness. Things will never be the same as they were when we were twenty-three. But maybe, in some ways, they can be better.

And if I don’t make it through, I hope that Christina can know you. I don’t want to put pressure on anyone or anything. But it would mean a lot to me if she could have a role model like you in her life—a woman who loves deeply and fights for herself, who puts herself out there and holds out for what she deserves. You have more courage in your pinky than most people have in their whole lives.

I love you,

Gabby

When Natalie reached the end of the letter, she went back and read it again, then a third time, tears streaming down her face. At some point, without realizing it, she’d sat down on the couch, her legs giving way beneath her. As she memorized Gabby’s words, wanting to tattoo them onto her soul, she startled at a hand on her shoulder.

Rob, looking down at her in concern. “What happened?”

“Gabby wrote me a letter after all,” she managed to squeak out. Rob sat down next to her and pulled her into him, and she cried into his chest until she managed to get a hold of herself.

When she finally pulled back, she wiped her eyes and said, “It’s been so long since she went in. Shouldn’t we have heard something by now? Is the radio silence a good thing or a bad thing?”

“I don’t know,” Rob said.

“I can’t help worrying—” Natalie began, then cut herself off.

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