All right then. Was the plan to stare at each other awkwardly? I’d lost my appetite, and the cupcakes weren’t the least bit enticing.
“I have cancer,” David said. “And so I guess that’s the best place to begin.”
“What?” All the heat blanched from my face, leaving me chilled. I clung to the scarf in my hands to warm them. I had to have misheard him. “David.”
“Prostate cancer.”
I pushed down the ball suddenly lodged in my throat. “You’ve been getting so tired lately. Hudson had been worried,” I said stupidly, but all the time I was around him, he seemed to tire faster than a man his age should. Hudson had mentioned it once or twice in passing.
“How long?”
He tapped his fingers on his coffee mug and expelled a heavy breath. “I’ve known for a while. I tried radiation already, a common treatment but results came back that it didn’t work the way they were hoping.”
“You…” My head spun like I’d been tossed onto a tilt-o-whirl ride. “You kept this from them?”
He shrugged, seemingly entirely unashamed of his actions and yet I saw the guilt and regret in his dark eyes I’d always related to. Such sad, sad eyes.
I couldn’t fathom his reasoning. Not when he had family who loved him and he had so much help and support at his side.
“The initial diagnosis wasn’t severe and so we watched it for a while before taking any action. I thought, I thought I could get through it and no one would have to worry.”
“David.” Tears burned my eyes as I spoke his name.
“No one knows yet.”
“More secrets, then?” I arched a brow, unable to contain my irritation. “Why?” And what a stupid thought. Love made him do it, his desire to protect everyone. With my own heart squeezing painfully tight inside my chest it was difficult to rasp out a breath.
“I fear I’ve jumped many chapters ahead in the story, but if I start at the beginning, I don’t know if it will make as much sense.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I kind of need to start at the end and work my way back to the beginning if that’s okay.”
Even as the cage around my chest tightened in painful measures, I must have nodded or given some acknowledgement because he started anyway.
“Hudson, he’ll want to save me from it. And I’m worried. I worried for both of my children over the years.” He strummed his fingers on the tabletop, rattling his coffee spoon to the same beat everything inside of me felt rattled. “They had a lifetime of saying goodbye to people they loved without the experience of being able to truly live and love first. Melissa gave that love and cried her tears when we had to say goodbye to kids we welcomed into our home, but Hudson, with many he grew close to, he also closed himself off over the years, slowly, piece by piece when it was time to let them go.”
I shook my head. This was torture. Listening to this from David’s perspective was so drastically different than hearing it from Hudson’s. He always made it sound like his life was incredibly fun, I’d never considered how hard it would be.
“I’m assuming you know my wife, Jackie, died seven years ago?”
I nodded. At least I think I did. He flip-flopped through explanations quickly, and I was still hearing the word cancer echoing in my brain. “Yes. Hudson told me.”
“She was killed by a drunk driver on April tenth.”
A punch to the gut couldn’t have hit me with more force than those words. “What?” I gasped, hand going to my stomach to try to staunch the sudden urge to vomit. The timing… it couldn’t be.
“No,” I rasped, barely able to form sounds much less words.
“The same night of your accident, six and a half hours away, my wife was also killed by a drunk driver here. In their case, neither survived.” He rolled his lips together and beat back the emotion I could see threatening to spill from him. “When Melissa met you, she felt drawn to you for a reason she couldn’t have predicted, couldn’t have known, and definitely didn’t understand.”
He reached across the table then and held out his hand, palm up, waiting for me to place mine into his. I did without hesitation. He squeezed my hand firmly, the warmth from him so comforting, so much like Hudson’s, tears fell down my cheeks and I swiped them away with my free hand.
“When you told Melissa your story, she came home in tears, begging us to help you. She begged us so much Hudson lost his mind.”
“Jenna said...” I stopped and cleared my own throat, choked down tears and pain. “Jenna said she was dying. When she came to the prison?”
His lips pushed to one side before nodding. “She went to the doctor for her annual physical and was diagnosed within weeks. It was so late by then… she lived eight more months after.”
“I’m so sorry.” I squeezed his hand to offer him comfort but inside, my chest was rattling. Everything was too tight, like my bones were outgrowing my skin and a chillness swept over me so powerfully I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel warm again.
“She made us promise to help you. Teased Hudson one night it was her dying wish and he had to give that to her. He refused. I believe, even if he believed Melissa when she talked about you, his mom’s death was a stumbling block when it first came to you. That and stubbornly, I think he believed if he refused to grant Melissa’s wish, she’d pull through somehow. And I think now he carries that guilt with him that he couldn’t save her.”
“Jenna said that,” I muttered, not even truly thinking of it that way when she’d said it to me. I closed my eyes and tried to absorb his confessions and admissions, tried to piece them together in a puzzle that would make sense and still came up empty.
For as much as I’d been so angry and hurt, so much of it now made no sense.
And this was David…
“You’ve been through so much,” I said, lamely, for lack of anything better to say. My pulse raced and my head spun. There were so many similarities and so much loss for them.
“Why didn’t you tell me from this beginning?”
David let go of my hand and took a drink of his coffee, settling back in the chair. That familiar pulse of irritation bubbled in me. Was he debating what to say to me? How much honesty to give me?
“David,” I warned.
“It might seem silly. But Melissa, she was my princess, you know? I would deny her nothing.”
“Okay.”
“She liked you for him.”
“What?” I collapsed against my chair, this time, entirely sure I heard him wrong. There was no way. Absolutely no way.
“She said she thought you were pretty, told me once, at the end, that Hudson would like your fire and grit and hidden soft spots she was sure you had, too.”
“Stop.” This was madness.
He kept talking like I hadn’t said a darn thing but inside, my blood was heating. “I needed to wait to see if she was right about you.”
“Stop,” I repeated. My stomach was threatening to heave up everything I’d eaten that day, which admittedly wasn’t much.
He played this game with me to be a matchmaker? He played with my life? My heart? And Hudson’s? I didn’t know whether to slap him or hug him but all the pain I felt at hearing his diagnosis and the story of his wife was quickly turning into something else. If I sat through more of this, I might burn the place to ash with my anger.