Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 99949 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99949 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
“The couple had been told what to expect. Loss of speech, muscle coordination, memory. As the tumor slowly stole the woman’s life, the one thing it left her with was agonizing pain. She was forced to wear diapers when her brain stole her ability to control her own bodily functions. She had to get all her nutrition from a feeding tube. The drugs to try and keep her comfortable meant she lived in a constant state of not knowing what was going on around her. She had to physically be turned every day to prevent sores from developing on her body as a result of being stuck in a hospital bed. The diapers were replaced with a catheter and colostomy bag.
“The young lawyer did everything he could to care for his wife himself, but he had no family to lean on and hadn’t lived in the state long enough for the couple to make friends. He was forced to hire nurses to help with her care. Some were patient and kind, others treated her like a child’s unwanted doll. And through it all, the lawyer could see that his wife was still there. He could see it in her eyes, especially when silent tears would fall down her cheeks as she remained trapped within her own body.
“By the time she’d met all the criteria for assisted suicide, she was nothing but skin and bones and she’d had every human dignity stripped from her. The man had done everything right but after she was gone, he could only remember what he’d done wrong. The promise he’d made to give her a peaceful, painless death… broken. The promise he’d made that she would be able to choose when she was ready to go… broken. The promise that she’d be able to hold his hand and tell him how much she loved him before she went… broken. The lawyer had his entire life ahead of him, but he remained trapped in the past and only managed to put one foot in front of the other every day because he’d promised his wife that he would. The only promise he was able to keep.”
I fell silent as Theo processed everything I’d said. “You did for Rabbit what he wished he’d done for his wife.”
“He couldn’t undo what had happened to her, but he wanted me to have a second chance. The chief of police told me not to waste it. I needed to do more than just put one foot in front of the other. He told me surviving wasn’t enough. I needed to live.”
“But the video,” Theo said.
“When I finally got up the nerve to watch it, there was one part that was conveniently missing,” I said softly.
Theo had crossed his arms on my chest while he’d listened to my story, or rather, the lawyer’s story. “He erased it,” he breathed in disbelief. “The lawyer. He deleted the part showing you pushing the morphine.”
“He left the rest of it, though. The part where I got into bed with Rabbit and held him. Me injecting myself with the rest of the morphine. I watched myself slowly dying and all I could think was how pissed Rabbit would have been at me. All he’d wanted was a normal life and there I was throwing mine away. I couldn’t let it all be for nothing. So I took that cop’s advice and started with putting one foot in front of the other. But I didn’t even realize that I hadn’t really started living again.” I ran my fingers through Theo’s hair. “That didn’t happen until the day I met you.”
EPILOGUE
THEO
FOUR MONTHS LATER
Even if I hadn’t been alerted to his presence by Nacho and his pudgy offspring that Lincoln and I had finally decided to call Chips because it just sounded so damn funny when you called for the father and then his son, I would have heard Lincoln coming from a mile away.
Understandably, my man was anxious. I’d texted him that I needed to talk to him and to meet me at our spot once he got home. I hadn’t been proud of being so vague, but that little voice of self-doubt had kicked in just like my therapist had warned me it might, so I’d given myself an out by not telling Lincoln what I wanted to talk to him about.
But the fact that he was hurrying to get to me was proof that we both needed this moment.
“Hey,” Lincoln said as he rushed to where I was sitting on a blanket I’d brought with me. Autumn in Minneapolis had always been on the cool side, but it was barely the end of October and I was already freezing my ass off.
“I’m okay,” I said even as my nerves kicked in. It was ironic that it hadn’t taken more than a couple of months of therapy to get to a point where I was comfortable with pushing my boundaries when it came to having sex with Lincoln, but to share the details of my final shameful secret, the one he’d given me permission to take a lifetime to tell him, had taken so much longer for me to even be willing to talk to my therapist about. The only other discussion that had come even close to this in terms of the fear factor was when Ford and I had finally talked.