This Is Not How It Ends(66)

The man in the bed was sick. Like bad sick. Skinny. I scanned the chart, his fingers, anything to prove to me this was Philip. My Philip. His head was bandaged in white gauze. There was a purple bruise staining his left cheek. His eyes opened and he found me.

“It’s you.”

Tears streamed down my face. “It’s me.”

“Do I look that awful?”

Fear forced a laugh to escape. “Yes, Philip. That awful.”

I reached for his hand. It was cold and lifeless.

His frailty alarmed me. He knew it, too, and his eyes shifted from side to side.

“Come on, Charley,” he coddled. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

He was wrong. It was worse. There was something very wrong with Philip. Something very bad that made him fall. Something sinister that had him vomiting all over himself in Miami, and it was the reason he’d lost so much weight.

I had no interest in smiling—none—but I did it. For him. And the pretending hurt, but it masked my worry.

“What did the doctor say?” I asked.

“I took a nasty fall, darling.”

“Overstating the obvious, Philip. A promising sign.”

Tubes and wires connected him to machines that beeped and pulsated. Wiry arms appeared from beneath the hospital garb. Small and helpless were words I’d never before used to describe Philip, but he looked terribly slight, and it was then that I realized the hue of his skin. Philip was a pale Brit, and even weekends in the Florida sunshine didn’t turn him brown. People like him turned pink, and on a long day, they became lobster red. Philip’s skin wasn’t tanned, and it wasn’t a blush of pink. It was yellow. And he was scratching at it excessively.

“What’s the matter, Charley? You look terribly frightened.”

My legs buckled. I wasn’t imagining things. There was a tint to his skin that sucked the air out of me.

“I’ll be back.”



I raced down the hallway, hating everything about this place. The smell of antiseptic and infection crawled up my nose, fueling the abruptness that landed on a heavy-set woman behind the nurse’s station. “I need to speak to my fiancé’s doctor.”

“Did you press the call button, ma’am?” she asked, barely looking up from a stack of papers. “If it’s an emergency, all you have to do is press the call button in his room.” I clenched my fist and sneered under my breath. This is a fucking emergency.

“I need to speak to Philip Stafford’s doctor. He’s a patient. Room 823.”

Footsteps came up from behind me. “That would be me.”

The man approaching the desk didn’t seem old enough to be a doctor, and I told him so.

“I’ll take that as a compliment, I think, Ms. . . . and you’re bleeding.” He pointed to my arm.

I covered the bandage with my hand. “Charlotte. Charlotte Myers.” He was shorter than I, and I hoped what he lacked in stature was made up for in medical expertise. His hair was doing the thing that all the teenagers’ hair does: a pronounced peak at the very top. “Can we talk for a minute about Philip?”

“I was just about to go in and see him . . . You’re the girlfriend?”

“Fiancée.” I went to touch the ring, stroke it with my fingertips, only the ring wasn’t there. My finger was bare. It was at Ben’s. I’d taken it off before giving him the courtesy of screwing someone’s fiancée. Philip’s fiancée. “Fuck.”

“Ms. Myers, was it something I said?”

I stuffed my naked hand in my pocket and shook my head. “It’s nothing.”

He was holding a thick file in his hand, and it was then I noticed his name sewn across the left breast of the white coat. Marc Leeman, MD, Oncology. “It’s good to finally meet you.”

“Philip’s going to die, isn’t he?”

He maneuvered me through the hallway to an empty examination room. “Why don’t we sit down.” Turning, Dr. Leeman called out for one of the nurses. “Josie, do you mind taking a look at this young woman’s arm?”

The pungent smell of disinfectant filled the air, and I took a seat on the examination table while constructing a story that didn’t include the death of someone I loved. Josie tended to my arm, and I was oblivious to her, eyes trained on the doctor. He took his time, but I was way ahead of him.

“It’s pancreatic cancer,” I told him.

His expression was unchanged.

“Miss Myers, I’m not sure you understand—”

“Oh, I understand!” I shouted at him. “Do you have any idea what this means?”

He flipped through the folder’s contents, and I’m certain he gave the nurse, Josie, a baffled look.

I wouldn’t cry. I refused to cry in front of this little man. Not now. No. I’d save my tears for the hell I was about to go through. I bit my lip to make it stop quivering, knowing the world was a cruel fucking place.

“My mother died . . .” I stopped while Josie tugged on my skin with her instruments. “She died from pancreatic cancer. There were signs . . .” I dropped my head and his followed. “I didn’t want to see it . . . He was tired . . . I knew something was wrong. But not this. Something else maybe. Then I saw his skin . . . Have they located the tumor? The head of the pancreas?”