Page 116 of The Love Haters

“She won’t just fire me, by the way. She’ll fire mewith extreme prejudice. And then she’ll blackball me with every future employer. I won’t just have to change jobs. I’ll have to changeindustries.”

“This seems extreme.”

“And she’ll do the exact same thing to you.”

“Tome? I didn’t do anything!”

“But that’s not the worst of it.”

“How is that not the worst of it?”

“The worst of it has nothing to do with Sullivan. And it’s got nothing to do with our jobs. The worst of it is the real reason I’m here.”

I sighed, likeSeriously?Then I demanded: “Which is?”

“It’s not because I want to be, that’s for damn sure. It’s becauseRue told me to be.”

Rue told him to be? “What’s going on, Cole?”

But here Cole’s tone shifted. He looked away for a second. “So…” he said, his voice quieting. “Nobody really knows about this yet, except for me, and now you… so don’t talk about it with anyone else, okay?”

This was a lot of buildup. “Okay,” I said.

“Rue…” Cole said then, looking down at the grass and then rubbing the back of his neck as he hesitated to say the words, “is sick.”

My first reaction was to demand that hetake that back. How dare he say that about Rue?

“Of all the lies you’ve told—” I started.

“You think I’mlying? About Rue?”

“You’ve been lying all night, so it’s definitely on-brand.”

“I would never lie about this.”

Okay, that felt true enough.

I looked over at the party across the way. Rue was relaxing in a chair near the pool, fruity drink in hand, smiling in that purposeful way she had—determined to enjoy every minute. She didn’t seem sick. But Rue was also the kind of person who wouldn’t seem sick.

I turned back to ask, “What’s she sick with?,” and saw that Cole was watching her, too.

“Something that has no cure.”

“Just say it, Cole,” I said.

Cole said, “It’s what they call a long-term terminal illness.”

“What does that mean?”

Cole looked down, and then he said, “It means she has heart failure.”

I wanted to argue with him. But something about his expression stopped me.

“She was having chest pains and shortness of breath,” Cole went on.“She was worried it was lung cancer because she used to smoke back in the seventies, so she insists that run-of-the-mill heart failure is an improvement. Rue said it will bethe thing that gets her—but not right away. She’s convinced that she can make it another ten years.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“They love her optimism.”

---