PART 3: My chest began to thump. “Serious enough?” Hannah spoke in a lowered tone.
“Mr. Bennett, Vivian has been undergoing treatment for a severe illness. She has tried dealing with it for quite some time.”
The hallway seemed to tilt underneath my shoes.
“What sickness?”
“I’m not permitted to share her complete medical history with you. But she’s awake, and she knows we called. She inquired whether you had arrived.”
For the first time since the phone started ringing, I felt an emotion other than terror.
Hope.
“She asked about me?”
Hannah nodded.
“Then, once I told her you were on your way, she requested that I make sure you understood she hadn’t brought you here to ask for anything.”
I failed to understand.
Not her words.
Not the ring she had left on my pillow.
Not the message telling me to find happiness.
For three years, I had believed Vivian wanted a life apart from me.
Now I was standing outside a hospital room, discovering that the woman I had loved for over two decades had been carrying a secret she never trusted me enough to share.
I glanced at Hannah.
“Please lead me to her.”
She unlocked the door.
And there, resting in a slender hospital bed beneath a white sheet, was Vivian.
My Vivian.
The woman who used to hum off-key while flipping pancakes on Sunday mornings. The woman who wept during classic movies and pretended she had seasonal allergies. The woman who once drove forty minutes through a thunderstorm simply because I had left my lunch behind at home.
She appeared so frail that I barely recognized her.
Her cheeks had sunken. Her hair was shorter than it had been during Emma’s wedding, and a pale scar vanished beneath the collar of her hospital gown.
Yet when she turned her head and noticed me, her eyes welled up with tears.
“Lucas.”
I remained frozen.
She attempted a smile.
“You made it.”
Something inside my chest cracked.
I crossed the floor in three swift paces and stopped right beside her bed.
“What happened to you?”
She cast her gaze down toward her hands.
“I’m sorry.”
“No.” My voice emerged harsher than intended. “Don’t do that. Don’t begin with an apology. Tell me what’s going on.”
Her lower lip quivered.
“I didn’t want you to witness me like this.”
“Like what?”
She looked back up.
“Like someone who might not pull through.”
For several moments, I couldn’t hear anything aside from the steady rhythmic beeping of the monitor beside her bed.
Then I pulled a chair closer and sat down.
“Vivian, look at me.”
She did.
“Whatever this is, you don’t get to decide entirely on your own that I can’t handle it.”
A single tear slid down her cheek.
“You always did that.”
“Did what?”
“Made everything seem so simple.”
I reached out for her hand.
It felt cold.
Three years prior, I had held that exact same hand on our porch while she told me she wanted a divorce. I had held it at the courthouse when we signed the final paperwork. I had held it one last time on the night she came back home, believing we might finally have found our path back to one another.
Now I felt terrified that this would be the final time I ever touched her.
“Tell me the truth,” I whispered. “All of it.”
Vivian shut her eyes.
And finally, after three years of silence, she began.
“About four years ago,” she started, “I began feeling fatigued all the time.”
I listened without cutting in.
“At first, I assumed it was work. Then I thought it was just my age. I was waking up exhausted, losing my appetite, and occasionally feeling pain in my abdomen. I kept telling myself it would pass on its own.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite interpret.
“Because I didn’t know how to tell you something might be terribly wrong with me when you were already carrying so much.”
“Carrying what, Vivian? I was working in a woodworking shop. I wasn’t fighting in a war.”
“You were looking after everything.”
“That’s what being married means.”
She let out a brief, sorrowful laugh.
“I know. That’s what you always said.”
She paused to catch her breath before proceeding.
“Eventually, I went to see a doctor. They found something during the checkup, and following additional tests, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.”
The word cancer seemed to echo across the room.
I had encountered it before. Friends had battled it. Coworkers had lost parents to it. I had attended funerals where people whispered that dreadful word as though speaking it too loudly might make the situation worse.
Yet I had never imagined hearing it come from Vivian.
“When?” I asked.
“Almost four years ago.”
I stared at her in disbelief.
“Four years?”
She nodded.
“That was prior to the divorce.”
“Yes.”
I stood up so abruptly that the chair scraped loudly against the floor.
“You knew you had cancer, and you asked me for a divorce?”
“Lucas—”
“No. I need to understand this. You were sick, and rather than letting me assist you, you terminated our marriage?”
Tears filled her eyes once more.
“I believed I was doing the right thing.”
“For whom?”
She couldn’t come up with an answer.
I walked over to the window, pressing my palms against the sill.
For years, I had replayed the night she requested a divorce. I had analyzed every conversation, every argument we never had, every quiet evening we spent sitting silently in the same room.
I had blamed myself for failing to notice she was unhappy.
I had wondered whether I had grown boring, whether my work mattered more to me than our marriage, or whether she had spent years waiting for me to become the man she needed.
And all through that time, she had been fighting cancer.
I turned back around.
“Did you ever consider giving me the chance to choose what I could handle?”
Vivian covered her mouth with one hand.
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because I knew you, Lucas.”
“You knew me for twenty-two years, and you still didn’t realize I would want to be there for you?”
“I knew you would be there.”
“Then what was the problem?”
She looked at me through her tears.
“You would have surrendered everything.”
I shook my head.
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. You would have shut down the shop. You would have stopped seeing your friends. You would have spent every night beside my bed and every morning pretending you weren’t tired. If I recovered, you would have told me it was nothing. If I grew worse, you would have blamed yourself for not doing enough.”
My anger faltered because, in the quietest corner of my heart, I knew she wasn’t entirely wrong.
I would have done all of those things.
Yet that didn’t make her decision correct.
“You turned me into a stranger to my own wife,” I said.
She bowed her head low.
“I know.”
“You made me believe I wasn’t enough for you.”
“I know.”
“You let me spend three years thinking the woman I loved had simply stopped loving me.”
She began crying harder.
“I know, Lucas. I know.”
I walked back to the chair.
For a while, neither of us spoke a word.
Then I asked the question that had been tearing at me ever since I found the ring on my pillow.
“Why did you come to my house that night?”
Vivian looked up.
“Because I grew tired of pretending.”
“Pretending what?”
“That I didn’t miss you.”
Her reply was so soft I nearly missed it.
She took a shaky breath.
“I had been in remission for a while. My doctors felt hopeful. I started thinking maybe I could lead a normal life again. Maybe I could return to work without everyone looking at me with pity. Maybe I could stop thinking about hospitals every single time I woke up.”
She offered a faint smile.
“And then I saw you at Emma’s wedding.”
I remembered the way she had glanced at me across the table.
The green dress.
The familiar smile.
The hand pressed against her side.
“I told myself seeing you would be easy,” she continued. “I figured three years was plenty of time to become strangers. But when you looked at me, I remembered everything. The good parts. The bad parts. The ordinary things I had taken for granted.”
Her fingers tightened around mine.
“I remembered how you used to leave the porch light burning when I worked late shifts. How you always saved the final slice of pie for me. How you pretended not to notice when I drifted off during movies.”
“You always claimed you were just resting your eyes.”
“I was resting my eyes.”
“You snored through the entire second half of The Notebook.”
She emitted a weak laugh, and for a fleeting moment, I saw the woman I had married.
Then her smile faded away.
“I came to your house because I wanted one night where I didn’t have to be the sick woman. I wanted to be Vivian again. Your Vivian. I wanted to sit in our kitchen, drink terrible coffee, and talk to you without wondering if every conversation might be our last.”
I swallowed the heavy lump in my throat.
“Then why did you leave?”
She glanced toward the bedside table.
“Because I woke up ahead of you, and I panicked.”
“About what?”
“About how deeply I still loved you.”
I stared at her in silence.
She went on before I could reply.
“I watched you sleeping. You looked so peaceful. I thought about all the years we shared and how effortlessly I had shattered the life we built together. Then I considered what would happen if I stayed. I would crave another morning. Then another. Before long, I’d be asking you to love me once more, and I was terrified of making you endure everything I was facing.”
“So you left me a ring instead of a conversation?”
“I didn’t know how to say goodbye.”
“You could have begun by telling me the absolute truth.”
“I know.”
She gazed down at her bare ring finger.
“I took it off because I thought you deserved to keep the memory of our marriage without being chained to whatever was happening to me now.”
I reached inside my pocket.
I had brought the ring along with me.
I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps some part of me had never accepted that the story was over.
I placed it on the blanket sitting between us.
Vivian stared at it.
“I couldn’t throw it away,” I said. “I couldn’t toss it into a drawer. I carried it around for two weeks, wondering if I should mail it back to you.”
She covered her face with her hands.
“I am so sorry.”
I let the quiet settle in before posing another question.
“What did Hannah mean when she mentioned you had arranged for them to contact me?”
Vivian wiped her cheeks.
“Following the divorce, I updated my medical records. I kept you listed as my emergency contact.”
“Why?”
“Because you were the person I trusted most in the entire world.”
I looked at her closely.
“Even after you divorced me?”
“Especially after I divorced you.”
I shook my head, unable to find the appropriate words.
She kept going.
“I know how that sounds. I know I had no right continuing to ask you to be part of my life after I walked away from yours. But I couldn’t bring myself to swap your name out for someone else’s.”
“Did Melanie know?”
“Everything.”
“Rebecca?”
“She knew about the cancer. She knew I still loved you. She felt furious with me for leaving, but I begged her not to tell you.”
I leaned back against my chair.
Suddenly, the wedding arrangement made complete sense.
Rebecca’s insistence that we sit together. Her knowing smile. The song from our wedding playing just as the evening began settling around us.
She hadn’t simply been trying to entertain two divorced individuals.
She had been trying to grant us a chance to speak.
“Does everyone know except me?” I asked bitterly.
“No.” Vivian shook her head. “Most people only know we divorced. I didn’t want anyone pitying me, and I didn’t want you feeling pressured to return.”
I studied her for a long time.
“Vivian, I loved you when we were young. I loved you when our hair started turning gray. I loved you when we barely spoke across the dinner table. I loved you when you told me you wanted to leave.”
My voice cracked.
“And I loved you even after you left.”
She pressed my hand against her cheek.
“I realize that now.”
“No,” I said softly. “I don’t think you truly do. Because if you did, you would have understood I wasn’t searching for a flawless wife. I was searching for my wife.”
She closed her eyes.
For the first time since stepping into the room, my anger subsided.
I remained hurt. I suspected that hurt would linger for a while.
Yet beneath that pain lived something stronger.
Love.
Not the young, uncomplicated affection we felt when first married, but something that had survived isolation, mistakes, distance, and three years of unanswered questions.
I leaned forward and kissed her forehead.
“We have a lot to discuss.”
She nodded.
“Yes.”
“But we aren’t tackling all of it today.”
She looked at me uncertainly.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re lying in a hospital bed, I am exhausted, and neither of us is going to resolve three years of silence prior to lunch.”
A slight smile formed on her lips.
“You always did insist on making schedules for everything.”
“Someone has to.”
She chuckled softly.
And for the first time that morning, the room felt a bit less frightening.
Yet I still needed clarity on one thing.
“Are you going to get better?”
Vivian’s smile vanished.
She glanced toward the window, where sunlight was slowly creeping across the floorboards.
“I don’t know.”
It stood as the most honest answer she had given me.
And somehow, it was the exact one I needed most.
The following morning, I met Vivian’s oncologist.
His name was Dr. Harris, a gray-haired man possessing kind eyes and the weary expression of someone who had spent countless years delivering news people never wished to hear.
Vivian had granted permission for him to talk about her condition with me.
He showed me the most recent scans and explained what the physicians had discovered.
Her cancer had returned.
It had spread past its original site, and she had experienced symptoms for several weeks prior to her hospital admission. The immediate issue landing her in the hospital was treatable, though the underlying illness remained severe.
Treatment options existed.
Risks existed.
Guarantees did not.
I absorbed every single word.
I asked questions until I grasped what the doctors knew, what remained unknown, and what choices Vivian would face in the upcoming weeks.
When I finally returned to her room, she looked at my face and immediately knew.
“What did he say?”
I sat down beside her.
“He said there are things we can try.”
She searched my expression.
“Lucas, don’t tell me what you think I want to hear.”
“I’m not.”
“Is it bad?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes welled up with tears.
“Yet he hasn’t told us to surrender,” I continued. “And neither have I.”
She turned her face away.
“I don’t want you watching me die.”
I felt those words like a physical blow.
I grabbed her hand.
“Then don’t ask me to leave while you’re living.”
She stared at me fixedly.
I went on.
“I don’t know what the next six months will look like. I don’t know what the treatments will do to your body or how many difficult days we’ll endure. I don’t know if we’ll get the exact ending we want.”
I paused.
“But I know I don’t want to spend another day pretending you don’t matter to me.”
Vivian started crying.
I moved closer and embraced her gently, mindful of all the tubes and wires attached to her.
For a long stretch, she rested her forehead against my shoulder.
Then she whispered, “What if I grow worse?”
“Then we’ll face that specific day when it arrives.”
“What if I can’t do the things I used to do?”
“Then we’ll discover new things to do.”
“What if I transform into someone you don’t recognize?”
I pulled back just enough to look straight into her eyes.
“Vivian, I watched you age over twenty-two years. You watched me age too. We both changed forms. That’s what happens when two people share a life together.”
I brushed a stray lock of hair away from her forehead.
“You don’t need to stay the exact woman I married to remain the woman I love.”
She covered her mouth and sobbed.
And I held her tightly until she was ready to let go.
Vivian was discharged five days later.
I drove her over to Melanie’s house, where she had been staying ever since the divorce.
Her sister swung open the front door before we even reached the porch steps.
She looked at Vivian, then shifted her gaze to me.
For a moment, nobody uttered a word.
Then Melanie wrapped both arms around her sibling and began crying.
“Oh, Vivi.”
Vivian held onto her tightly.
“I’m fine, Mel.”
“No, you certainly aren’t.”
“I will be.”
Melanie shut her eyes.
“You don’t have to keep repeating that.”
I stood on the porch, suddenly conscious that I had stepped into a family conversation beginning long before my arrival.
Once they finally separated, Melanie turned toward me.
“Lucas.”
I nodded in acknowledgment.
“Melanie.”
She wiped moisture from her face.
“Thanks for coming.”
“I wasn’t about to stay away.”
Her expression shifted.
“That was what I hoped you would say.”
Inside, Melanie had prepared a guest room for Vivian featuring fresh linens, flowers, and a small nightstand beside the bed.
I helped carry her luggage upstairs.
When I returned downstairs to the living room, Melanie waited for me.
“She needs people around her,” she stated.
“I know.”
“She won’t always tell you when she’s hurting. She dislikes making anyone worry.”
“I know that as well.”
Melanie studied me intently.
“Are you certain you can handle this?”
I understood what she was asking.
Could I return to the life of a husband following three years of being told I was no longer one?
Could I endure the dread of losing someone I had already lost once before?
Could I watch Vivian grow weaker without letting fear consume every remaining moment we possessed?
I thought it over before replying.
“I can’t promise I’ll execute it perfectly,” I said. “But I can promise I won’t vanish when things get difficult.”
Melanie nodded slowly.
She then reached into a drawer and pulled out a thick envelope.
“There’s something else you need to know.”
Inside rested several journals, a folder containing medical records, and a stack of envelopes.
On the cover of the first notebook, Vivian had penned a single word.
Lucas.
I stared at it blankly.
“What is this?”
“Her journals,” Melanie explained. “She started writing following the diagnosis.”
I opened the initial notebook.
The first entry was dated nearly four years prior.
Today, I learned that my life might not stretch out as long as I once imagined.
I shut the journal.
“I shouldn’t read these without getting her permission.”
Melanie nodded.
“I agree completely. Though she asked me to hand them over to you if she ever became seriously ill.”
I looked back at the stack of envelopes.
“Did she write all of these?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t she ever mail them?”
“Because every time she finished one, she convinced herself sending it would make everything worse.”
I stared down at the top envelope.
My name was scrawled in Vivian’s familiar handwriting.
I took it with me when departing that afternoon.
However, I didn’t open it until reaching my own home.
My house felt different that evening.
The porch swing creaked gently in the breeze.
The rosebush beside the garage remained alive, just as Vivian had once requested.
Inside, the kitchen carried a faint aroma of the coffee grounds left in the machine that morning.
For years, I had tried making the house feel less vacant.
I bought a new television set. I repainted the living room walls. I replaced those old curtains Vivian complained about for a decade.
None of it helped whatsoever.
Now, standing inside the very kitchen where she had once asked me for a divorce, I realized the emptiness had never concerned the furniture.
It revolved around the person who was missing.
I sat at the dining table and tore open the envelope.
Dear Lucas,
If you’re reading this, Melanie likely decided I could no longer keep everything bottled up inside.
I’m sorry. I realize those words grew meaningless between us, yet I don’t know where else to begin.
The day I learned about the cancer, I sat parked in my car outside the clinic for nearly an hour. I watched people stroll by. A woman carried a sleeping baby. An elderly man struggled folding his umbrella. A young couple debated where they parked.
Everyone else was living an ordinary day.
I remember thinking I would surrender anything just to experience an ordinary day with you once more.
I wanted to come home. I wanted to tell you everything. I wanted to let you hold me while I cried.
Yet then I pictured your expression upon hearing the news.
I knew you would attempt saving me.
You would source the finest doctors. You would read every medical article. You would spend nights searching for answers and mornings telling me not to worry.
You would convert your entire life into a pledge that I would survive.
And I felt terrified that someday, when survival proved impossible, you would believe you failed.
I stopped reading right there.
My eyes burned fiercely.
I walked to the sink, splashed cold water over my face, and returned to the table.
The letter carried on.
I told myself walking away from you was an act of pure love.
I told myself granting you enough time would mean meeting someone capable of growing old beside you without demanding you spend your final years inside hospitals.
Yet another truth existed which I felt too ashamed to admit.
I felt afraid.
I was scared of becoming dependent on you. I was frightened you would witness me sick and remember me exclusively that way. I worried every cherished memory we created would eventually be overwritten by hospital machinery sounds.
Most of all, I feared needing you so intensely I would forget how to function as myself.
I understand now that I was wrong regarding what love required.
I thought love meant shielding you from my pain.
I failed to realize love also meant trusting you enough to let you choose whether you wanted to share it.
I lowered the letter down.
For three years, I believed Vivian left because she no longer wanted me around.
Yet the truth proved far more complicated.
She loved me so deeply she convinced herself she needed to disappear entirely.
And while attempting to protect me from losing her, she forced me to lose her while she still drew breath.
I resumed reading.
There remains one final thing you should know.
I never stopped wearing my wedding ring inside my heart.
The night I dropped by your house, I intended asking you to let me stay.
I wanted waking up beside you again.
I wanted brewing coffee in our terrible machine and complaining how you forgot purchasing milk.
I wanted spending the remainder of my life with you, regardless of how short that life might be.
Yet when morning came, I recalled the promise made to myself: refusing to drag you back into a life you were already forced to leave.
So I removed my ring.
I placed it upon your pillow because I figured it stood as the sole way to leave something honest behind.
I now see it was just another dishonest act performed under the banner of love.
I am sorry.
Should I recover, I hope finding courage to tell you everything becomes possible.
If I don’t, I hope you remember those shared years represented the happiest period of my life.
You were never the burden I needed escaping.
You stood as the home I felt too frightened returning to.
Love always,
Vivian.
I folded the letter neatly.
Then I sat at the table and wept.
Not due to discovering Vivian loved me.
I always suspected some fraction of her did.
I cried because I finally understood how fear robbed three years away from us.
And knowing we could never recover those lost years.
Yet today still belonged to us.
For the first time in a long duration, I knew what to do with it.
The following morning, I unlocked the woodworking shop at my standard hour.
For twenty-eight years, the shop served as my sanctuary.
I had built dining tables, cabinets, rocking chairs, and custom bookshelves for families seeking lasting pieces.
I appreciated wood because it taught patience.
You couldn’t force a crooked board straight merely by wishing it different. You had to understand the grain, work alongside existing flaws, and accept certain marks remaining regardless of careful sanding.
I had spent years trying to repair furniture.
Now I wondered whether I proved equally determined repairing everything besides my marriage.
My longtime employee, Tom, arrived promptly at eight.
He took one look at me and set his toolbox down.
“You look awful.”
“Good morning to you as well.”
“Did you sleep at all?”
“Hardly.”
He studied me closely.
“Is everything okay?”
I hesitated momentarily.
Then I shared the truth.
“Vivian is sick.”
Tom’s expression softened instantly.
“How sick?”
“Severely.”
He didn’t ask for explanations.
He had known Vivian nearly as long as me. He attended our wedding and helped assemble the kitchen cabinets inside our first house.
After a brief pause, he asked, “What do you need?”
I surveyed the workshop.
For years, I believed keeping business operations running defined responsible manhood.
Yet machinery could run independently.
Orders could face delays.
Wood could wait.
“I need you managing things here for a while,” I stated. “I’ll still handle major decisions, though daily presence might fluctuate.”
Tom nodded.
“Then that’s what we’ll do.”
Just like that, a burden I spent years imagining transformed into something simple.
I called Vivian after lunch hour.
She answered on the second ring.
“Lucas?”
“Have you eaten yet?”
A pause followed.
“Hello to you too.”
“Hello. Did you eat?”
“Melanie made soup.”
“Did you finish it?”
“Some of it.”
“That isn’t a proper answer.”
She laughed softly.
“You sound precisely like back when I was pregnant during Emma’s godmother’s baby shower cake.”
“That was an entirely different scenario.”
“You insisted I consume three meals plus two snacks.”
“You were trying surviving solely on crackers.”
“They happened to be excellent crackers.”
I smiled.
For several minutes, we chatted about ordinary topics.
The weather.
The rosebush.
The ridiculous cost of groceries.
Then I asked, “Would you like me coming over tonight?”
She fell quiet.
“Are you certain?”
“No, Vivian. I’m certain of nothing anymore. But I know I want seeing you.”
Her breath hitched.
“Then yes.”
I headed over to Melanie’s house that evening carrying groceries, a compact toolbox, and a bag of coffee beans sourced from the shop near my home.
Vivian inspected the coffee package.
“You brought your own brand?”
“I know how particular you remain.”
She smiled.
“I figured you preferred coffee strong enough keeping spoons upright.”
“I learned from the finest.”
We sat together at the kitchen table while Melanie went upstairs making a phone call.
For a while, neither touched upon the future.
We discussed Emma’s wedding.
We reminisced about past neighbors.
We debated whether the blue paint chosen for our first house proved a mistake.
Then Vivian reached across the table surface.
“Thank you returning.”
I took her hand.
“I didn’t return, Vivian. I never truly knew how leaving.”
Her eyes filled with moisture.
And this time, she didn’t attempt hiding them.
The ensuing weeks proved far from easy.
Appointments, blood tests, scans, and lengthy physician consultations filled our calendar. Days arrived when Vivian felt strong enough strolling through the garden, alongside days when simply exiting bed demanded more energy than available.
Certain mornings brought optimism.
Others brought fear and anger.
I learned loving someone through illness meant avoiding scripted words.
Sometimes, it meant sitting quietly beside her while she wept.
Sometimes, it meant arguing when she rejected meals.
Sometimes, it meant stepping outside for five minutes because mutual exhaustion made speech impossible.
We likewise held tough conversations concerning our marriage.
One afternoon sitting in the garden, Vivian remarked, “I don’t expect your forgiveness.”
I looked over at her.
“Why not?”
“Because I hurt you.”
“Yes, you certainly did.”
The nod came slowly.
“I know.”
“I don’t think forgiveness operates the way you imagine,” I continued. “You don’t apologize once and watch everything magically fix itself.”
She glanced down at her palms.
“I understand.”
“Yet I also refuse spending remaining time punishing you over things beyond changing.”
She lifted her gaze.
“So what happens now?”
I weighed the question.
“We speak truth. We stop deciding things for one another. And when fear strikes, we admit feeling frightened rather than pretending fine.”
She released a shaky breath.
“That sounds difficult.”
“It will be.”
A sad smile crossed her face.
“You always preferred challenging projects.”
I chuckled.
Then reached for her hand again.
“One promise remains required from you.”
“Anything.”
“Don’t telling me leaving because you think it hurts less.”
She stared at me intently.
Ultimately, she nodded.
“I promise.”
I believed her.
Not because certainty existed she wouldn’t feel frightened again, but because this time we shared building that promise together.
Three months post-hospital call, Vivian commenced another treatment round.
Doctors explained possibilities carefully. Cures weren’t guaranteed, though treatments might control diseases improving quality of life.
Vivian elected proceeding.
I accompanied her hospital visits whenever requested.
Preferred days spent with Melanie received equal respect.
We learned loving without converting love into control.
One afternoon following an exhausting appointment, Vivian sat passenger side gazing out windows.
“I have a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“If recovery happens, what becomes of us?”
I glanced over.
“What do you mean?”
She twisted her bag strap between fingers.
“Meaning our divorce status. Pretending nothing changed simply because mutual love remains is impossible.”
I nodded slowly.
“You’re correct.”
Disappointment showed despite attempts at hiding.
I reached grabbing her hand.
“Returning to previous marriage forms isn’t my goal. Building something superior is.”
“What if identical mistakes repeat?”
“Then discussions occur long before three-year silences form.”
She laughed faintly.
“And if discovering we grew too different occurs?”
“Honest confrontation handles that too.”
She studied my expression.
“Willingness starting over genuinely exists?”
“Vivian, building customer dining tables requiring four finish revisions happened last year. Starting over poses no issue.”
She burst into laughter.
Unguarded laughter unheard for years, filling my eyes with tears while smiling.
Then seriousness returned.
“Choosing me out of fear dying alone isn’t what I want.”
I turned fully toward her.
“Being here stems from loving you. Illness didn’t birth that love. It forced stopping pretenses.”
She pressed my hand against her cheek.
“Then trying again is what I want.”
I kissed her forehead.
“Me too.”
Remarriage wasn’t rushed.
Ceremonies weren’t necessary proving reconstruction efforts.
Instead, dating resumed.
Initially felt ridiculous.
Twenty-two shared bed years followed by picking Vivian up for dinner times.
Knocking Melanie’s front door rather than barging with groceries was insisted upon.
Flowers were brought.
Teasing over identical rose choices occurred.
Returning to the small Italian eatery celebrating fifth anniversaries happened. Recognition brought questions regarding milestone celebrations.
Vivian looked at me.
“What details should be shared?”
I smiled.
“Attempting getting our initial date right.”
The owner laughed providing complimentary desserts.
For the first time years, Vivian consumed entire meals without clock-checking or rest apologies.
A small evening.
Transforming into favorite memories.
Around month four, encouraging test results emerged.
Treatments helped.
Physician caution remained regarding guarantees, though latest scans indicated disease response.
Oncologist explanations brought face-covering tears from Vivian.
I reached out.
“Good news?” inquiringly.
The doctor smiled.
“Encouraging news. Close monitoring continues, though current observations please us.”
Vivian cried.
Me too.
Parking garage exits featured passenger seating holding folded results.
“Lucas?”
“Yes?”
“Different feelings expected.”
“Different how?”
“Good news disappearing all fear was anticipated.”
Nodding followed.
“Fear proves stubborn.”
Faint smiles appeared.
“Like you.”
“Handsome styling exceeds fear.”
Laughter ensued.
Hand reaching occurred.
“Going home desired.”
Surprise met the word.
“Yours or mine?”
Looking at me.
“Ours.”
Immediate answers failed.
Inability prevented speech.
Engine starting halted, turning off completely.
Vivian turned.
“What’s wrong?”
I looked
