Page 64 of The Devil Gets His Due

“Because can you imagine going through your whole life only to find your soulmate a few months before you get diagnosed with stage four cancer? Can you imagine leaving that person and your teenage daughter, knowing you’ve hurt them and they won’t ever, ever get over it?”

His brow furrows. “Wouldn’t you just be glad you were missed? That, to me, seems like a sign you did something right.”

I shake my head again. “Ineverwant to do that to anyone else. I don’t want my daughter to spend her whole life missing me. I don’t want a guy coming to my grave every month, unable to move on.”

He grips the edge of the bench. “That’s why you didn’t want kids, isn’t it?”

I force a smile. “I mean, Coachella was a factor, too, I’m not gonna lie. But yeah, that was most of it.” I pat my stomach. “Anyway, what’s done is done, and now you’re screwed. The parent who dies first gets all the worship. No one is going to talk about the times I drank too much or really fucked something up and all my flaws will seem charming.You’llbe the parent who has to be multidimensional.”

A muscle flickers in his cheek and his hands curl into fists.

“You’re so goddamn sure you’re going to die young, Keeley,” he grits out. He soundsangry. “Even if your mom had some genetic thing that made this happen…she only contributed half of your genes. Why aren’t you even considering the possibility that you’ll be fine?”

I stare out at the descending sun. “It just seems easier than getting my hopes up and discovering I was wrong. My mom was soshocked, Graham.” I swallow hard and my voice grows quiet. “When she got that diagnosis, she was so shocked because she thought she’d done everything right. I’m just trying to be realistic.”

He wraps an arm around my shoulders. “Was it that she was shocked, or was it thatyouwere shocked? You realize being prepared wouldn’t have fixed anything, right? She wouldn’t have wanted you to go through your whole childhood panicked you were going to lose her.”

“Yeah, I know.” But I think of my mom’s last days of consciousness when she knew what was going to happen. She was devastated. Anytime Dillon or I walked into the room, she cried. And that made it harder for us. It was just this horrible, inescapable circle of grief.

“I guess it’s just…if it happens, I don’t want it to hurt me the way it hurt her. I don’t want it to be so hard to say goodbye to everything, and have it be so hard on them.”

He pulls me closer, and I rest my head on his shoulder. It’s a nice shoulder, broad enough to hold me up, perfectly firm.

“The only choice is to love everything a little less, Keeley. I’m not sure that’s a better option.”

He might be right. More importantly, I’m not sure it’s even possible. Because I already love our daughter. And I’m starting to like her father an awful lot too.

“I want dessert,”I announce on the way home. “Like I don’t even want dinner. I just want dessert. And because I just cried, you have to give in and coddle me.”

He laughs. “We could make a pie.”

“Do you knowhowto make a pie? Because I sure as hell don’t.”

“Of course I do,” he says, and his eyes are light. “I think we probably have all the ingredients too. I just bought apples yesterday.”

Making a pie sounds like a pain in the ass, the kind of thing that will lead to a barely edible mess neither of us will want to eat or clean up. But when he’s like this, all twinkling eyes and dimples, I’m incapable of telling himno.

“Okay. But if it’s inedible, you’re taking me to Pinkberry.”

“Deal,” he agrees with a quiet, confident laugh.

When we get home, I change into one of the new maternity t-shirts I bought after Ethan’s Tulane sweatshirt disappeared, which Grahamclaimsto know nothing about.

He sets me at the counter to peel and slice the apples while he works on the crust. I watch, mystified, as he scoops flour and sugar into a bowl and mixes it with the butter he set out to soften. He never has to check a recipe once.

“How do you know how to do this?” I ask. “I can’t even boil eggs without looking up the instructions.”

With his hands he kneads the dough then shapes it into a ball. “My great-aunt taught me when I was little,” he says, only glancing up briefly.

“And you remembered it? All this time?”

He hesitates. “My mom was…sick. After my dad died. She had really serious postpartum depression that got missed with everything else going on. Anyway…things went bad for a while, and then my great-aunt came to get us all back on track, and she told me the pies were my job.”

He doesn’t seem bothered by this story at all, but I am. He waseight, which was too young to be given a job of any kind. “I’m not sure an eight-year-old should be using a stove.”

He shakes his head. “It helped, knowing there was something I could do, some way I could make up for things. Anyway, until I left for college, I found myself making a lot of pies.”

“I still wish you hadn’t had to,” I tell him quietly. Our eyes meet and I have to look away. “The apples are ready.”

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