Page 17 of Hello Stranger

“Your mom,” he said again. “She…”

Another pause. I tapped the table in his line of vision. “She what?”

He looked up and met my eyes. “She died of a cavernoma.”

I sat back.

Heck of an adrenaline jolt there.

“I thought she died of a stroke,” I said.

“She did. A stroke from a burst cavernoma.”

“That seems like something I should have known sooner.”

“Maybe if you’d gone to medical school you’d have learned all about it.”

“Are you giving me shit about medical school right now?”

He pursed his lips together at the curse word—which seemed like the least of our problems. Next he tilted his head forward like he was forcing himself to take a calming moment. Then he said, “I’m telling you, you can’t wait. You have to do this right now.”

“I can’t do it right now. I don’t have time.”

He lifted his eyes to meet mine. “That’s exactly what your mother said.”

Oof.

Then, before I’d absorbed that, he added, “And she might even have been wearing that very same robe when she said it.”

I looked down and took a breath. Time to stop arguing. “So you’re saying… she had this same exact thing?”

“Yes. It’s inherited.”

“And she knew she had it?”

“Yes.”

“And she was advised to have it fixed?”

“Yes.”

“But she didn’t? And then she died?”

He nodded. “Precisely.”

“Why didn’t she have it fixed?”

My dad looked away. “I don’t think we need to get into that.”

“What else could there possibly be to get into?”

“I don’t want to dredge up the past.”

I lifted my hands, like,What the hell?“Too late. It’s dredged.”

“The point is—just get it done.”

To be honest, I wasn’t going to fight him. My dad might be a complicated, difficult, overly formal, pathologically reserved, not-particularly-fond-of-me person… but he wasn’t stupid. He was, as Lucinda could verify, a “very prominent cardiothoracic surgeon.” He knew his shit. He understood—if nothing else—the workings of the human body.

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