could banish the cancer from my body with one sweep of her hand.
She stops in front of me, her blue eyes glittering behind her glasses. Without a word, she grabs my shoulders and hauls me against her in a powerful, unbreakable embrace.
All the courage I’ve clung to for the past week drains out of me. My throat closes over. I press my face into Kelsey’s shoulder.
“I’m going to cry,” I warn her.
“That’s okay.” Her voice is gruff. She tightens her arms around me. “So am I.”
Chapter 17
Dean
December 9
The nightmares creep in, slow and insidious. Bella is screaming for me, but I can’t find her in the dark, slimy cave. Nicholas is in the ICU, almost unrecognizable attached to machines with tubes snaking down his throat. Liv is on the edge of a cliff, ghostly pale, her hair whipping in the wind. I’m running toward her, my muscles aching and lungs bursting with the effort.
Just when I reach out to grab her, she stumbles backward, off the edge of the cliff. I watch helplessly as my wife falls through the gray mist, her scream stabbing me in the heart. Then I step off after her.
I wake sweaty and shaking. I crawl out of bed, away from Liv’s warm body, and climb the stairs to my tower office. It feels like the safest place right now, locked above the world. I plunge into work, welcoming the reprieve of emailing people about conservation techniques and ancient monuments.
To avoid the nightmares, I stay awake more often than not. I get through my lectures and office hours on auto pilot, trying not to think about the fact that I’m shortchanging my students, that they deserve more than a professor who is only half there. If that.
I call my parents and sister to tell them about Liv, getting through the conversations by sticking to the medical facts. Though Liv and I aren’t close to my family, we’ve stayed in touch with them since Nicholas was born, exchanging emails and photos. Over the years, they’ve come to like Liv, and they’re shocked and saddened to hear of her diagnosis.
I’d learned at a young age how to keep my private life private. My parents were rigorous about maintaining a specific public image, which meant hiding all our flaws beneath a veneer of perfection.
That brittle perfection was the reason Archer and I fought, the reason I isolated myself when my grandfather was dying. And it took me a long time to understand, with bone-deep shame, that it was also the reason I’d kept my first marriage from Liv.
Admitting failure, much less my worst failure, to anyone was an intolerable weakness. Admitting it to Liv was unthinkable. I hated the gut-wrenching fear of how she would react, that she might look at me differently, that it would change anything between us. In the end, it did, but in an ultimately good way, a way that made me love her beyond what I ever could have imagined. And then even more than that.
Which is why I don’t know how to react when word of Liv’s illness spreads like wildfire around the history department. Within a few days my colleagues and students either don’t know what to say to me or are kindly but overly solicitous.
The worst times are when well-meaning people ask me too many questions about her treatment or prognosis, and I give the same speech repeatedly, or when someone wants to tell me about their aunt’s or mother’s battle with breast cancer.
I can’t muster up appreciation for anything. Not the stories of success. Not the sympathy. Not the questions. Not even the offers of help.
Because everything people are saying reinforces the fucking nightmarish truth of what is happening to my wife.
My wife.
“You’re reading Pride and Prejudice?”
I look up at the sound of Kelsey’s voice. She’s standing at the door of my university office, dressed in a tailored gray suit with a folder in her hand. She walks to my desk and reaches over to pick up the paperback.
“Uh, yeah.” It takes me a second to process her question. “I mean, I was. I haven’t read any of it for a while. It’s one of Liv’s favorite books, and she got all bent out of shape because I hadn’t read it. So I was…I was going to surprise her.”
“Nice.” Kelsey sets the book back on my desk. “You still can.”
I shrug. In the time since I first opened the book to now, the idea of reading a book for my