Page 19

My body reacted viscerally, physically, as his words struck me off-balance. I didn’t teeter on my heels because I was used to men trying to push me down from their height. But that wasn’t what Elliot was doing. Not in the slightest.
He was enchanted. Maybe bored by the small-town fisherman life. I was something shiny and new and attractive, and he was building me into something I wasn’t.
“You’re a romantic,” I observed as if I was calling him a fascist.
“Hopeless,” he shrugged without shame.
I gripped my purse, beyond ready to get some space between us. “I’ll remedy that at dinner, one that will be free of romance.”
His mouth twitched. “We’ll see.”
None of my usual arsenal was making an impact. He wasn’t angered by my coldness, my hardness, the blatant blows that were usually fatal to a fragile male ego.
I rolled my lips together, staring at the envelope on the bar, the real reason I was there.
All of my desire, frustration and complicated thoughts cleared as I returned to look at Elliot.
“Your niece…” I wanted to soften my voice but was unable to do that, so it still sounded harsh, businesslike. “What kind of cancer does she have?”
Like a kick to my stomach, his smile disappeared, and grief so raw, so all-encompassing, took over his expression.
“Acute lymphocytic leukemia,” His voice became deadened, all joy leached from it.
I felt guilty. For returning him to the place where he lived underneath all the easy smiles— constantly consumed by pain, agony and worry for someone he obviously loved with all of his being.
Although I wasn’t a soft and cuddly aunt, I loved my nieces and nephews with every millimeter of my shriveled heart, and the thought of anything happening to them made my chest hurt. I would go to the ends of the earth to locate any kind of demon or devil to sell my soul to in order to keep them safe.
You know, if I hadn’t already sold it to make myself rich and powerful.
“How is she?” I was still unable to inject any empathy into my tone, although I felt it radiating to my bones.
Elliot clenched and unclenched his fist on the bar. “She’s a fighter.” He smiled, but the smile was so sad and full of pain that it made my eyes fill with tears I would’ve readily shed if I was weaker or a woman capable of feeling more. Though maybe it was my rejection of feelings that made me weaker.
“But without a bone marrow transplant, it doesn’t look good.” Elliot spoke over my shoulder, his eyes wide, unseeing.
It felt like my throat was lined with thorns. Unable to keep looking at him, my eyes went back to the bar, to the bottles behind it, anywhere but on the man who was obviously in a kind of pain that superseded any kind of petty bullshit I was involved in.
“None of us are matches,” he continued. “My brother, me, my father.”
I forced myself to look at him, to witness the defeat in his words. I didn’t know this man from Adam, but I knew menlike him, like my brother. All they wanted to do was protect those they loved. My brother would’ve given all of his bones, his organs, his lifeblood in an instant to save his children. And not being able to do that when it might’ve been the only thing to keep them on this earth would haunt him for eternity.
Powerlessness. That’s what I was witnessing. Powerlessness, not defeat. I saw that he had not accepted, would not accept, that there was no treatment, yet I also felt hopelessness creeping in.
“We’re on a list,” he sighed.
I sucked my teeth. I had a cynical view of our healthcare system because it was inherently fucked. Sure, she might have had a chance to get a donor, but the chance was small. People bought their way to the top of those lists all the fucking time.
I was the person who made them the money required to do so.
My lunch swirled in my stomach.
“Where’s her mother?” I demanded.
Elliot’s face scrunched up with fury that looked unfamiliar yet embedded. “She left,” he bit out. “When she was three months old.”
I gaped at him. “Three months old?”
I thought of my nieces, how tiny they were then. How helpless. How reliant on the woman who birthed them for safety, comfort. Even me, the self-professed callous bitch, found it impossible to understand leaving something that small and sacred.