Quarterback Sneak (Red Zone Rivals #3)(91)

Because he spoke first.

And everything changed.

“Gem,” he rasped, his voice broken under the weight of his words. “Gemma, did you hear me?”

“I heard you,” I managed.

My own voice mirrored his, broken and raspy, laced with dread. Of course, he assumed it was because of the blow he’d delivered. My sad-eyed, exhausted husband thought he’d broken my heart with his news. But the truth was my dread was born of a different source. It was simply me mourning the absolute conviction with which I’d believed in my plan and its certain success.

Now, I had no plan.

Now, my cheating husband and his secret lover were not the center of this conversation.

Now, my cheating husband had cancer.

The kind that couldn’t be fought.

The kind that would end his life.

Soon.

It’s okay, I tried to assure myself, pressing a hand to my chest so I could feel how fast my heart was beating beneath my ribcage. Just make a new plan.

But, as it went with my special brand of anxiety, my plans not working out the way I envisioned them often left me grappling. Suddenly, everything I thought I had on a leash was running wild, and no matter how I tried to talk myself down, I couldn’t. Every time that happened — every time my plan went wrong — my emotions would win, all logic gone, all sense of what should be done lost like a whisper on a breeze.

“Please,” he whispered, grabbing the legs of my chair and pulling me toward him. The wood made a terrible noise as it rubbed against our kitchen floor, sparking a wave of chills from my ankles to the top of my spine. “Don’t cry, my sweet gem. It will be okay. We’ll be okay.”

He wrapped his arm around me, one hand cradling my head into his chest as the other caressed my back. Those hands had touched another woman, and they were now touching me, and I wanted to pull away just as much as I wanted to stay there forever.

He was going to leave me. He was going to leave this world.

My tears felt like they belonged to someone else as they soaked his sweater, and I tried to decipher where they came from. It didn’t take long for me to realize they weren’t born from one, singular source, but rather from all of them — like a waterfall made of glaciers melting all at once in the first warm wave of spring.

My husband was cheating on me.

He loved another woman — one who did not bear my name.

I would be alone, because I would lose him.

Only now, it wouldn’t be because of his infidelity. The choice to be alone would not be made by me standing tall, demanding more, not accepting his affair.

Instead, he would fade from the Earth and I would remain, mourning him along with his other lover.

Maybe I cried because, though I had a plan, I secretly prayed he would thwart it. Perhaps I half-envisioned me leaving him, chin held high as I walked away, and half-envisioned him begging me to stay, promising to relinquish his love affair, for our marriage meant more to him than she ever could.

Regardless, it didn’t matter now.

Now, I had a cheating husband who would never learn my knowledge of his infidelity.

Because now, I would never tell him I knew.

What would be the objective? With a blow as hard as terminal cancer, was there really any point to leaving him now, to letting him fight the final weeks of his life alone? Was there any point to telling him I knew about the other woman he touched, other than satisfying my need to feel in control, to shove my proof in his face and say Ha! I know what you did!?

Death has a funny way of putting life into perspective for us. And what had once been so important to me — that need for vindication I held so tightly on my drive home — didn’t seem to matter now. There was really only one thing that did.

I loved him.

That emotion was easy to pin down.

And because it was the only thing I could truly grasp, I held onto it tightly, knuckles white and aching. Carlo Mancini was my husband, and I, his wife. He was my everything — and that was still true, regardless of who else he’d shared a bed with.

So, I pulled back from his embrace, and kissed his lips — lips I always thought would be only mine to kiss — and I told him I loved him. I told him I was there. I held his hand and told him that, come what may, he had me by his side.

And by his side I stayed, until the very day he died.

Somewhere in that warped, whirling span of time, I think a part of me died, too.

I watched cancer wither my strong, commanding husband into nothing but skin and bones. I watched his eyes grow hollow, his lips ashen, his hands weaken where I held them in mine. Every day that I looked in the mirror, I watched my own eyes change, a hardness settling in. I watched a twenty-nine-year-old girl become an old woman in just weeks — weeks that felt like years, but flew by like days.

And on the day of his funeral, I watched a girl younger and prettier than me mourn him from the back row of our church.

She cried the same tears that I did, though I swore her heart was in more pain than mine. Because she had the satisfaction of being the other woman, of being the one he couldn’t live without — so much so that he was willing to risk his marriage, his reputation, his life that he had built. She knew without a doubt that she had been his world, that she had been the last face in his mind before the light was extinguished and he faded off into nothing.

I didn’t have that same comfort.