Page 137 of Severed Heart

“Or?” she prompts.

“Cee ... it’s time to fess up,” I coax gently, “what are we doing today?”

“Before you say no”—she holds up a palm in an ask to hear her out—“just know that I chose you specifically for this because I know you’ll get my reasoning.” She lowers her beautiful navy blues. “At least, I hope so.”

“All right.” I stop the cart, crossing my arms and giving her a pointed stare. “Out with it.”

“I want to clean Delphine’s house,” she blurts as my heart stutters to a full fucking stop.

“Come again?” I blink, my whole being lighting with awareness.

“She’s so, so sick, Tyler.” Cecelia’s eyes water with concern. “And so thin. So thin. She looks like death, and it’s fucking terrifying. She can barely walk from one room to the other. I don’t know if she’s going to live much longer or if I’m just seeing things grimly, but she’s all alone—”

Cecelia’s voice faded after her delivery as I blinked into autopilot while my heart went fucking hummingbird with fear. Everything slowed as I swiped my card at the checkout, mustering words for a mock argument with Cecelia about paying and, after, somehow summoning return conversation on the drive to Delphine’s house. Coming apart at the seams as I loaded the bags and followed her up to the porch steps to the door, a door Cecelia forced me to see still existed.

A blink later, coming face to face with a woman I’d spent endless days and nights believing was utterly out of my reach. Until, with the swing of her front door, Delphine was merely an arm’s length away as our eyes collided and held. Shock was evident in our expressions until devastation took its place within me at the state of her.

Every agonizing second after was a surreal blur, up to the one where I knelt in front of Delphine’s chair and truly took her in. Our mouths moving in a heavily camouflaged exchange with Cecelia close by, tuning into the tension our collision was creating as our eyes carried a different conversation altogether. Both of us greedily drinking the sight of one another in as I searched for any sign of my fighter and glimpsed only a pathetictrace. A majority of Delphine’s words were predictable, as if she, too, had partially flipped to autopilot. Only her return gaze told a different story, one that she didn’t verbalize.

Her soft whispered “thank you” to us back at her door, ringing sincere but defeated before she unexpectedly snatched me into a hug. An embrace Delphine held for long seconds that felt every bit like a goodbye—as if she was stealing the time for us before she forced herself to let me go. Those seconds in her embrace ignited a hellfire in my chest before I was released, and the door was again snapped closed, with Delphine behind it. That snap ending any real chance at an honest exchange or confrontation.

Reeling and disbelieving once we were back in my truck, I confessed the true nature of our relationship to Cecelia, though I heavily camouflaged some of the surrounding details. I was left reeling when Cecelia left me with a hug back in the shopping center parking lot... until anger kicked in.

Anger, which had me driving straight back to Delphine’s fucking door in search of an answer to one question.

I break the speed limit before exiting my truck and pounding back up the steps. Ripping open a door I can now so clearly fucking see. A door I stand just a step inside of now as my pulse kicks heavy with fury. Fury which roars inside the man hosting the kid who fled this house. A man who takes the fucking wheel now, who is hell-bent on seeing this through and getting his answer.

“My first crush?” I scoff as seconds continually tick by while Delphine doesn’t so much as look at me, eyes lowered as she sips herglassof vodka. “Is that what we’re calling it, Delphine?”

Cecelia might have unknowingly destroyed my mental barrier today with her insistence on coming here, her abundant heart ignorant of what it was asking of mine. But those cumulative years full of repressed heartache are being replaced with resentment as I glance around the tomb encasing Delphine, as the question burns a hole through my brain. The question ofwhy?

If her decision didn’t include alifewithme, fine. Butthisis what she chose instead—eight years stuck back in her starting position? Regressing a thousand steps back from the state in which I left her?

Why?

She doesn’t so much as look up as she lifts and pours more vodka into her glass, her French translation bible sitting open in her lap. Probably due to Cecelia’s impromptu study with her, in which I dismissed myself to clean the other two rooms. In truth, I’d locked myself in Tobias’s room before sitting on the edge of his bed, utterly wrecked and trying to get my shit together from the look of her. The fuckinglossof her.

All that trepidation is obliterated now as I glare over at her where she sits in her recliner, mind-numbing TV the only background noise to the war brewing inside me as I sweep her thoroughly and unabashedly.

As Cecelia described, she’s terrifyingly thin and so sickly—it’s gutting. A description that neither of my brothers included in their short updates. Maybe because they assumed I would orshouldknow.

Of course, I expected her to be sick,to look sick, butthis? The state of her indicates she’s committing nothing short of slow, purposeful suicide.

Deep etched half-moons look like stains beneath her eyes. Her typically poised, perfect posture sagging—more evidence of defeat and the poisonous cells multiplying inside her, weighing her down. Or a side effect of the poison chasing those cells to rob them of their job. One shepurposefullythwarts now, pouring even more fucking poison in her glass—her mission clear. But it was the defeat in her eyes when I knelt in front of her, so little left of her in her silver return stare, that had my heart remembering who broke it.

A fighter.

A fighter that’s imperceptible now. One I’m actively deciding to pick a fuckingwar withthe longer I stare at her. She was embarrassed when she locked eyes with me initially at her door, but she’s flat-out refusing now. It’s because she knows exactly what I’m piecing together because she’sguilty.Rage replaces all anger as I do what I can to temper myself.

“Back so soon?” she finally drawls in pure condescension as she tops her glass to the brim, the sight nauseating, the amount indicative she’s well past numbing sips and measuring her pints.

“Why this sudden hostility, Delphine? Wasn’t thatyouwho just hugged me goodbye?”

She lifts and drops a shoulder. “The last time you left, you were gone for a very long time.”

“If recollection serves, you fucking asked me to,” I spit in contempt that I don’t bother to mask.

“Ah, I see. Well, Soldier, over the years, I’ve come to believe we have a different opinion on the nature of your promise.”