"After everything we shared, you're telling me we're strangers?"
Before I could respond, he put on a look of sudden realization.
"Ah, I get it. You're still angry?"
He pulled an envelope from his pocket and held it out to me. "Don't be mad. I brought it for you."
"What happened back then was my fault. I knew this was the only thing you cared about, and I held it hostage just to spite you."
"But you've got to admit, your temper is something else. All this time, saying those hurtful things to me just to prove a point."
His long, elegant fingers hung in the air, the envelope swaying lightly between them.
"Go on, take it. Wasn't this what you gave up everything for in the divorce? The one thing you insisted on keeping?"
Rhys wore an expression of smug certainty, as if he'd already decided I would snatch it up with joy and follow him obediently back to that house.
He was wrong.
I wasn't the stubborn woman I used to be.
Ding.
The elevator doors opened.
While he was distracted, I slipped inside.
"I don't need it anymore. Burn it."
What Rhys had brought was a photograph.
A photograph of my son, placed on my chest by a nurse moments after he was born.
Five minutes after that photo was taken, I had a mastectomy.
The hormones that had surged through my body during pregnancy had turned an unremarkable nodule into a six-centimeter malignant tumor in just five months.
To save my life, I had no choice but to deliver my son by emergency C-section at thirty-five weeks.
When I woke up, Rhys was kneeling at my bedside.
He was sobbing, his voice broken and ragged. "This is all my fault..."
"It's my fault for wanting a baby. I poked holes in the condoms behind your back."
"I'm the reason you got cancer."
"You were so beautiful... what are we going to do now..."
He broke down completely, raising both hands and slapping himself across the face.
Each slap landed sharp and loud.
I fought through the searing pain from my incision and reached out to stop him. "Don't blame yourself. I just have bad luck."
Oliver Abbott's arrival had been unexpected, that much was true.
But the decision to keep him was one I'd made with clear eyes and a full heart.
I'd been naive enough to believe that all the misfortune had been carved out of me along with that tumor.
The worst was behind me. From here on out, things could only get better.
It took time to learn how wrong I was.
I had overestimated myself.
And I had overestimated human nature.
In the beginning, Rhys took care of Oliver and me with extraordinary devotion.
He fed the baby a dozen times a day, changed every diaper.
Burping, rocking him to sleep, bathing him. He was meticulous and endlessly patient.
After Oliver drifted off, Rhys would prepare a medicinal foot soak for me, massage my lower back, and kneel on the floor to carefully apply scar cream along my incision.
Whenever he had a spare moment, he sat at the computer, researching which hospitals performed the best breast reconstructions.
He compared every surgeon with painstaking detail, filling notebook after notebook with his findings.
At night, he followed guides from books, doing his best to give me emotional support.
Watching him spin like a top from dawn to dusk, I realized for the first time just how many hours a single day held.
Enough hours to do so many things.
He often fell asleep slumped over the edge of the crib.
In two months, he lost over twenty pounds. Nearly half his hair had gone gray.
It broke my heart. I suggested we hire help.
He just smiled. "You know me. I don't like strangers in the house."
"Besides, the people I love most deserve my personal care."
"So if you really feel bad for me, just focus on getting better, okay?"
The guilt nearly crushed me.
Because I was discovering that I hadn't accepted my body the way I thought I had.
Three months after leaving the hospital, I still hadn't looked in a mirror. Not once.
I couldn't bring myself to look down. The lopsided, unnatural lines across my chest made it impossible to breathe.
