Page 72 of When You Are Mine

She smiled when she saw Walsh at the door, patting the bed beside her, motioning for him to come sit. She placed the book she was reading pages down.

“Walsh, come in. How was the party?”

Walsh didn’t sit, refusing to go through the polite motions.

“Jo says you have something to tell me.”

Her smile dissolved. She folded her lips into a taut line, dropping her eyes to the book she had just discarded, running her finger down its spine.

“Did she now?” She blinked several times, not once lifting her eyes to meet Walsh’s.

“Mom, stop stalling. What is it?”

She swallowed, closing her eyes briefly before opening them to stare unflinchingly at Walsh.

“I have cancer, and it’s bad.”

The cartilage around Walsh’s knees softened. His heart hiccupped, snatching his breath. All the air left the room. He felt himself suffocating under the force of another unavoidable blow. But nothing could compare to this. There was nothing he could have done to brace himself for the searing pain even the possibility of losing his fearless mother brought.

He dropped to the bed where she waited, her face stoic. Walsh couldn’t formulate words to ask the questions he needed answered. A game of Scrabble had been tossed in the air, and every letter of every word was scattered on the floor. No words. Only an earth-shifting silence that left him disoriented and lost.

“It’s stomach cancer.” She plucked at the downy comforter covering her knees, fingers restless, eyes steady as she told him all she’d been hiding.

“I’ve been feeling tired for a while, but I’m always busy. So I didn’t think too much of it. I’d lost my appetite, but I’ve never been a big eater. Then I started losing weight. And a few weeks ago, I started bleeding.”

“How do we fight it?”

“It’s stage four. We’re getting a late start.”

“What’s the next step?”

“Well, they want to get in there and see how bad it is. How much it’s spread.”

“How soon can we do that?”

“I wanted to tell you first, but you’d just gotten home.”

“When did you find out?” Now he couldn’t stop asking questions, firing them at her in an unrelenting succession.

“I knew for sure the day you flew out to Haiti.”

“You let me go to Haiti knowing this? We’ve lost weeks.”

Walsh blinked back the burn of tears even the word “Haiti” brought to his eyes. Shitty emotion that he could barely swallow back, fight back, hold back. But he would for now.

“Walsh, I couldn’t very well tell you on the phone while you waited for your flight. And then, the kidnapping. It’s just been…a lot.”

“Jo knew this.” Anger threaded through the needle of his words. “Jo has known for weeks and she kept it from me?”

Walsh walked over to the door and toward the hall. “Jo, get in here.”

Jo was already in the hall, seated on the floor against the wall with her knees up. She met the desperation in Walsh’s eyes with tears pooling in hers. Uncle James’s wife had died when Jo was so small that Kristeene had been as much her mother as Walsh’s. He knew she felt her insides caving under the weight of this fight because he felt it, too. But what he needed now was the fierce strength she had seen in his mother, the strength she had planted in Jo.

“Get up. Come in here.”

“Walsh, I can’t.” Her voice was a shadow of its usual self. “What if…”

“What if what, Jo?” He squatted in front of his cousin, grasping her hands in his. “What if she dies? Right now, based on what I’m hearing, the odds aren’t really in our favor. But we’ll do everything we can and hope for the best. You ready?”

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