Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 46197 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46197 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 231(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
“Someone needs to start talking,” I warned them. “What if someone took Halo from you?” I asked Bane. “Or Winslet from you?” I asked my brother. “You’d both lose your goddamn mind.”
“Not the same,” Bane told me. “Halo is my world. My center. My calm. She is also my wife.”
“Who you get to keep protected. Safe. You don’t have to worry about anyone hurting her. That’s not a threat you face, but you can’t tell me if someone hurt her, you wouldn’t show your own version of crazy. She wasn’t always your wife, but before she took your last name, did you love her less?”
He shook his head. “No, but I don’t just love Halo. She saved me. Brought me back from the darkness that I didn’t think I’d ever return from after losing Crosby. She owns me. Without her, I have no soul.”
“I wanted to come home,” I snarled. “I thought being home meant Madison. My family. But I saw her again. Nothing had changed for me.” Stabbing my chest with my pointer finger, I leaned closer to Bane. “My home isn’t a fucking town, and it’s not family. Because the moment I looked into her eyes again was when I felt it. Home. SHE is my home.”
Bane was looking at my brother again, who had remained silent through it all. Not trying to convince me he loved Winslet more than I loved Cressida.
“I’m sorry,” Oz said behind me. “But right now, we need you focused. She doesn’t focus you. She distracts you.”
“Her being taken from me fucking distracts me!” I yelled and jerked free of his hold to turn and look at him.
What was his deal? Why did he look so goddamn torn up? Was this because he didn’t agree with them taking Cressida, but wasn’t going to admit it?
“Mom has stage four liver cancer.” Oz’s voice cracked as he said it.
The oxygen felt as if it had been sucked from the room.
“What?” I asked.
I hadn’t heard him right. I couldn’t have.
“She thought she was allergic to something she was eating. She was having abdominal pain.” His words came out hoarse. “It got better when she cut out her glass of wine in the evening, but that was short-lived. Then there was swelling, and she went in for testing.”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No.”
The emotion on his face, the pain in his expression, his silence—it all made sense now.
“What?” I asked. “What does the doctor say? I mean, what about treatments? How are they going to get rid of it?”
Oz glanced at Bane, and I didn’t like that. When his gaze came back to me, I saw the answers I did not want to hear. The sorrow was deep.
“Stage four means it’s spread beyond the liver. It isn’t curable, but there are treatments to slow its progression. Prolong her life.”
I took several steps back until I had the wall behind me for support. “But we can afford the best treatments.”
“Yes. And she will be getting them. But all the money and connections in the world can’t cure cancer.” Oz’s words came out raspy. “She wants you home. Her baby boy under her roof. She wants her Christmas to be happy. She needs you to be here. With us. Not going psycho over your obsession with a girl. Please, Kash, give her that. Let Cressida go. For now at least.”
In all my life, I knew I’d never face anything as unfair again. Being asked to choose between the woman who had given me life, loved me, raised me, who was the only gentleness I had known, growing up, who needed me while her body turned on her, and the one girl who had stolen my soul seven years ago and would own it until the day I died.
Twenty-Two
Kash
The past week, we had started having family breakfasts together. Forge, Oz, and Winslet all came, and we sat around the dining room table, the way we had growing up. Mom didn’t look sick, but Dad had said that once she started treatments, things would change. She was going to undergo some cutting-edge treatments that had been personalized for her specific condition. The doctors had wanted to start her on them immediately, but she’d said she wanted to wait until after Christmas.
We all had one goal now, and it was to make this holiday perfect for her. I felt guilty for the fact that I hadn’t even noticed my parents’ absence so much since I’d gotten home. I’d been so preoccupied with being back, then finding ways to see Cressida that I didn’t question my parents not being around. They had been seeing a specialist and going over the process that would start the day after Christmas. Oz had said it had taken Dad to get her to agree not to wait until the new year, like she’d wanted to.