You can follow us all summer as we pull weeds and water and pick the tomatoes.”
“I might do that,” she said, undeterred by his sarcasm. “For now, I’ll stick with taking pictures of you planting the garden. Later, we can come up with a strategy for the rest of the year.”
He wasn’t sure if she was joking or serious. He supposed it didn’t really matter. Right now, he couldn’t seem to think beyond the fact that he would at least get to see her again in a few days.
22
JULIET
She was a lousy patient.
That was a rather humbling realization for a woman in her fifties to discover about herself but was nevertheless the absolute truth.
Juliet shifted position on the recliner where the physical therapist had returned her when he left an hour earlier.
She hadn’t been very nice to the poor man. The memory made her cringe. She should have been more cooperative. He was only trying to help her heal. Instead, she had been sarcastic and sharp, especially after he had suggested she was perhaps not giving her all to her recovery.
Something about his patronizing tone had made her want to yank his ID badge off and shove it into his flapping cake hole.
The man was two decades younger than she was and obviously fit. He probably subsisted on only tofu and kale. He had no idea how hard these exercises were for her. She was trying her best but everything was harder. In addition to multiple broken bones, she had a serious neurological disease.
Her multiple sclerosis complicated everything, especially her confidence in herself. She hated that part, the little creeping doubts that had begun to take over.
She had always told herself she could learn to live with her diagnosis and handle her disease with grace and dignity. She had met others online who were dealing with their symptoms superbly. Many of them had been in remission for years and were using a combination of diet and exercise to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible.
She wanted to be among that group. Many, like her, had chosen not to reveal the diagnosis, at least to coworkers and associates. Most had valid reasons. Inevitably, when someone announced they had a serious condition, the ripple effect included workplace discrimination, relationship problems, social stigma.
She still wasn’t sure if her decision not to tell Caitlin and Olivia about her condition had been correct. When she had been diagnosed four years earlier, after suspecting something was wrong for several months before that, she had been shell-shocked and told herself she needed time to come to terms with it herself before she told them. And then Olivia had been at a transitional time in her life, dating the man she would later become engaged to and starting a new job with a new apartment, and that hadn’t seemed right, either.
How could Juliet mar her daughter’s newfound happiness by telling her she had been diagnosed with MS, especially when she had still been adjusting herself?
Because she didn’t want Olivia to know, she hadn’t felt right about telling Caitlin, either. Her granddaughter had enough worries in her life and she knew Caitlin well enough to be certain her granddaughter would turn clingy and overprotective.
In her heart, Juliet knew those were simply excuses. She hadn’t wanted people to know about her multiple sclerosis because she didn’t want them feeling sorry for her.
She had found it unbearably difficult to be branded the sad young widow in town after Steve’s untimely death. She had hated the pitying looks she would see in other people’s faces, the awkward, uncomfortable gaps in conversation in social situations, the way some of her friends had dropped away because they hadn’t known what to say to her.
That pity was only magnified after Natalie’s overdose.
She could have told Olivia and Caitlin about her MS at any time in the past four years. She still wasn’t sure why she had been so fiercely determined to keep it to herself. Pride, maybe? Or was it simply habit?
Olivia didn’t need another burden to carry. Juliet knew it was hard enough for her to leave her job in Seattle to come back and help her recovery. She absolutely didn’t want her to feel obligated to move home permanently.
Guilt twisted through her. She should just tell everyone and be done with things. She wouldn’t be able to keep her MS a secret forever anyway.
If nothing else, she would at least have to tell Henry, especially if he persisted in thinking