me you were having a tough time with it, but—”
“It’s not just that.” Allie turns to take a tissue from the box on the desk and wipes her eyes. “I mean, yes, I was in shock too. I couldn’t believe it when you told me. I still can’t, and yet, here you are, having gone through surgery and chemo and…oh, goddammit, Liv, why did it have to be you?”
An uncontrolled sob bursts from her, and then suddenly she’s crying so hard that tears stream in rivers down her face. She takes off her glasses and buries her face in her hands, huge sobs wrenching her with such force she can hardly catch her breath.
I bolt off the sofa and wrap my arms around her. Her body is shaking, her sobs ripping through her and into me. I manage to get us both onto the sofa, still holding her as tightly as I can as she presses her face into my shoulder and cries and cries.
We sit for so long that I don’t even realize my own face is streaked with tears until we finally separate. I wipe my eyes on my sleeve and go to get the box of tissues from the desk. We mop up and catch our breath until we’re both able to speak again.
“I didn’t want to tell you this,” Allie says with a hiccup. “I couldn’t. I don’t talk about it much anyway, but especially…my mother died of breast cancer.”
My blood goes cold. While I’ve known Allie’s mother died when she was young, I’ve never known how she died.
“Allie, I’m sorry.”
“I was fourteen.” She stares at her hands, ripping the damp tissue into little pieces. “She’d been diagnosed six years before.”
“Six years?”
“First in her right breast, then they found a tumor in her left. She had a mastectomy, but a year later it spread to her spine. I can’t even remember how many times she went through chemo. Five maybe? Six? And surgery, drugs, radiation…but the cancer spread to her brain. Finally there was nothing anyone could do and…oh my god, this is exactly the problem, Liv. How can I be telling you this? It’s the last thing you need to hear.”
She presses her hand to her mouth. A heavy silence falls between us. I know—I have known, since the beginning, since Dean found the lump—the cancer inside me could spread even more.
It could also go away.
“You…you can tell me anything, Allie. Anything.”
“But not this.” She wipes at a stray tear. “I hated it when my mother was sick and people would tell us all these horror stories about other people who had died of cancer. I just wanted them to tell us something good, you know?
“And my mom…sometimes I can hardly remember her before the cancer. I mean, I remember the days when she was well, the times when she even felt good enough to take a trip with me and my dad, but then the doctors kept finding the fucking tumors and another course of treatment would begin.
“And I was so damned selfish because I was a teenager and I needed her to be well, to be able to do all the things the other girls’ mothers did, but she couldn’t. The chemo made her so sick she couldn’t get out of bed, and she lost her hair so many times…”
Allie shakes her head and rests her hands against her eyes.
“I couldn’t stand the thought of that happening to you,” she says. “I couldn’t…couldn’t watch it happen. Not again.”
I press my forehead against her temple. “It’s not happening to me.”
“I know. I know all the rational stuff. But I couldn’t tell you. And I was so scared that if you came to work, especially during chemo, I’d either lose it completely or make things worse for you.
“I couldn’t come to visit you for the same reason. I was afraid I’d just sit there sobbing uncontrollably and make you feel horrible or scare you more than you already were. And I didn’t want Brent or anyone else telling you because I knew I had to be the one to explain. So the only thing I could think of was just to try and stay away from you until you got better, and then pray you’d still want to be friends when it was all over.”
“Oh, Allie. I’d never not want to be friends. But I wish you’d told me so I wouldn’t have been so confused.”
“Telling you about my mother’s metastatic cancer right before you