The poison has significantly accelerated the progression of his cancer. His respiratory function has been further compromised. We’re looking at a considerably shortened timeline.
Shortened timeline. The clinical, sanitized language for: your brother is dying faster now because someone decided to speed up the process.
And Rowan didn’t know. Or if he knew, he was choosing not to know, which was the same thing – a conscious, protective decision to keep the worst of it from reaching his face, so that when his little sister looked at him, she’d see a man who was fighting, not a man who was losing.
I couldn’t tell him. The truth would extinguish the smile he was giving me right now – that stubborn, ridiculous, entirely Rowan smile that said: I’ve survived worse than this, and so have you. And I wasn’t ready to be the one who took that from him.
“You’re fine,” I said. My voice didn’t crack. I made absolutely certain of that.
“I’m fine.” He settled back into the pillow. His eyes were closing – the conversation, the memory, the simple act of being conscious demanding a toll his body could no longer afford to pay. “Don’t stress. Go home. Get some sleep. I’ll be right here when you get back, complaining about the food and annoying the nurses.”
I leaned over him. Brushed the hair from his forehead – the gesture arriving from somewhere ancient and automatic, something our mother used to do, something I hadn’t done since I was a child and didn’t know I remembered until my hand was already moving. When had this happened? When had the roles reversed? When had the girl become the caretaker and the caretaker become the one who needed care?
“Rest,” I whispered. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
He smiled. His eyes closed. His breathing steadied into the shallow, regular rhythm of a body finally surrendering to sleep. I watched him for a long moment – counting the breaths, the way you count anything precious, anything finite, anything you know won’t last as long as you need it to.
Then I turned to leave. Opened the door. Stepped into the fluorescent brightness of the hallway-
And walked directly into a wall that smelled like expensive cologne and had a heartbeat.
Caelum.
He was standing right outside the door – close enough that the collision was full-contact: my face against his chest, his hands catching my shoulders, the sudden, physical reality of him filling the corridor with warmth and solidity and the complicated, electric energy of a man who’d driven across the city with photographs burning in his pocket and questions burning in his chest.
My heart lurched. Not from the impact. From the treacherous, involuntary, full-body relief that flooded through me at the sheer presence of this man – this frustrating, complicated, rose-leaving, wife-denying, lobby-humiliating, utterly impossible man – who was here, now, in a hospital hallway, because I’d told him where I was and he’d come.
The relief lasted approximately two seconds.
Then the lobby came back – the receptionist’s voice, the glass doors, the I don’t have a wife – and the relief curdled into something harder, something armored, and I did what I’d been doing my entire life when someone got too close to the soft parts: I froze.
I looked at him. Those dark eyes, searching mine with an intensity that bordered on invasion, looking for something – forgiveness, anger, the answer to a question he hadn’t asked yet. I could feel the heat of his hands on my shoulders. Could smell the cologne, the clean cotton of his shirt, the underlying warmth that was just him.
I stepped back. Folded my arms. Looked away.
And walked past him.
My shoulder brushed his as I went – deliberate, pointed, the physical equivalent of a sentence I hadn’t bothered to finish. I could feel him behind me – his presence, his confusion, the gravitational pull of a man who was not accustomed to being dismissed and didn’t know what to do with it.
Three steps. Four. Five.
His hand caught my arm.
Not rough. Not possessive. Just – there. A grip that said: please. And before I could process the grip or the please or the fact that my treacherous body was already responding to his touch, he pulled me into him, and his arms were around me, and his face was in my hair, and the world narrowed to the specific, devastating sensation of being held by someone who was terrified of losing you.
“I was sick with worry about you, Marlowe.” His voice was low, close, vibrating against the top of my head. “When you told me about Rowan, about Sterling, about the gun – I couldn’t -” He stopped. Swallowed. His arms tightened. “I drove here so fast I probably broke seven traffic laws.”
For one treacherous, beautiful, dangerous moment, I let myself feel it. The warmth. The safety. The particular, specific comfort of being enclosed by someone larger than you who is using their body as a statement: nothing gets to you through me.
Then I remembered the lobby. The words. The dismissal.
I pushed him away. Not gently.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.