Lethal Wedding (Wedlocked Trilogy Book 2) - Charlotte Byrd Page 0,37
for me plus some, but not enough to cover all of these medical treatments.
Besides, once she starts going to all these appointments, she will also need extra help at home. What does that mean for my job in North Dakota?
She knows all of this and that's exactly why she never told me what was happening.
“I'm really angry with you," I say after a moment.
Her eyes open wide.
“You had no right to do what you did,” I say. “You should have gotten treatment when you were first diagnosed, when the doctor first told you what you needed to do. But you waited and now… What if we don't have enough time?”
“What will happen will happen,” she says with a shrug.
Sometimes her defeatist attitude has been useful, especially in times when we were facing a situation that we couldn’t get out of. But this isn't one of those situations.
No, this is about seizing your opportunities, and going after it with everything you have.
“I don't want you to worry about anything except for how to get better,” I tell her. “You have to focus all your energy on that. Money doesn't matter. I can figure something out.”
She shakes her head.
“You don't believe me?” I ask.
“I know that you have a lot of rich friends now, but that doesn't mean that you have any money.”
“I know,” I say quietly. “Don't you think I know that?”
“I don't know what to think,” she says, turning her face away from me.
“Aurora is marrying someone else, you know that, right?"
I pull away from Mom. This is the first time that she has mentioned Aurora's name since our breakup.
“What do you want me to do about it?” I ask.
"You love her,” my mother says. “Why don't you tell her?"
“Because she's engaged to someone else, and she tells me that she loves him.”
“That's not good enough,” she says.
I take a deep breath and exhale slowly.
“Why don't you make an agreement with me?” I ask.
“What kind of agreement?”
“You promise to begin treatment and fight this thing with every last breath in your body and, if you do, then I promise to tell Aurora how I feel about her, no matter what it costs me.”
“I promise,” my mom says and closes her eyes.
On the ride back home, later that evening, my mother continues to dwell about the cost of the ambulance.
"I know that it's going to be in the thousands,” she says over and over.
“It is what it is. I didn't know what was going on with you. You coughed up a lot of blood and you just passed out. What was I supposed to do?”
“You were supposed to help me into the car and drive me over there,” Mom says. “These things happen. But they don't have to cost $3000 for nothing.”
“It's not for nothing, I already went over this,” I repeat myself.
We go in circles over and over again all the way home.
She's angry at me for not saving money, and I'm angry at her for keeping her disease from me.
Despite the argument, I get the sense that we are both angry about the same thing. She's young and none of this should be happening. Still, given how much she’s fighting me on this, it gives me hope that she can actually beat this thing after all.
When I get her back to her house, I help Mom to bed.
I make myself a cup of tea and sit on the same aging couch that I have sat on for years. I try to bury my worries in work. I go through my emails, but I'm too tired to write anyone back.
I open the research articles that Liam has sent me but I am too tired to read them. The words are all jumbled and I forget what I have read in the paragraph above when I start reading the one below.
No, I'm too spent to focus. I open Netflix and lose myself in an old episode of Frasier.
It's an old 90s sitcom that I never watched when it was really on but got really into afterward.
One episode turns to into another, and another, and I start to feel a little better. Not good enough to laugh, but maybe crack a smile.
A few hours later, tired and a little bit brain dead, I finally manage to fall asleep.
The following morning, I get up early and make my mom breakfast. There’s so much that I want to talk to her about but unfortunately, I can’t.
After her eggs are done, I take them to