Change of Hart (Wells Ranch #3)
Prologue Blair
Prologue—Blair
“I have lost myself, so to say.”
—Auguste Deter (first person to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease)
At 5:48 p.m. on Christmas Day, my life fell apart.
Rapidly blinking to clear the hazy film blurring the elaborate turkey dinner in front of me, I look toward the living room to avoid my mother’s gaze. Not twenty minutes ago, I was curled up on the couch with my sister in our matching pajamas, teasing Mom for turning on the fireplace television channel. Now the loudly crackling faux-fire and accompanying sleighbell-filled music adds levity I don’t appreciate.
Backdropped by the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree, my dad sits with a pained smile. “Sorry we didn’t tell you sooner.”
Alzheimer’s disease: a neurodegenerative disease that causes memory and thinking ability to decline. The most common form of dementia; it is irreversible.
Outside the snow is falling in a swirling fury—the perfect representation of what’s happening in my chest while I stare past my dad, cracking my knuckles to keep thoughts of hitting him at bay. Punching my loving father in the face won’t solve anything. It won’t change my mom’s diagnosis, or the fact that they’ve kept it hidden from me for months. But it will upset my parents, my sister, and my ten-year-old nephew.
The muscles around my chest constrict my lungs, and I struggle to take a full inhale as panicked thoughts overwhelm my brain. Letting out a shaky breath, I do what I always do: smile.
“Okay, we’ll handle it.” I clasp my hands in my lap to keep them from trembling wildly. “People are living so much longer with the disease now. There are tons of treatment options. We can set up some safety equipment—locks, alarms, notes—and it’ll be fine.”
It’ll be fine .
“It’ll be fine,” I repeat while fighting the waver in my smile. I give my younger sister a nod of encouragement, blinking back tears when I see marked fear in her eyes.
Of course, it won’t be fine. Our mom is younger than the typical age for Alzheimer’s. And while neuroscience wasn’t something I focused a lot on during my six years of nursing and graduate school, I know early-onset Alzheimer’s often progresses faster. Mom will forget everything she knows, piece by piece. Until her brain loses the ability to keep her body functioning. And nobody in this family will ever truly be fine again.
But for now—for the sake of protecting them—I’ll say it’s fine.
Fifteen minutes later, I excuse myself from Christmas dinner and pull out my laptop to spend the rest of the night in a deep dive on Alzheimer’s disease. Except a distracting orange sticky note on top reminds me of a call I was supposed to have with the local doctor, Dr. Brickham, earlier in the week about a job. My dad set it up, suggesting I take the job because of how desperate Wells Canyon is for decent medical care. But from what I can tell, every conversation I’ve had with my parents over the past six months was a long string of lies. Now I realize this was his subtle way of getting me to move back home.
“Fuck,” I mutter to myself, crumpling the paper and chucking it in the direction of the wastebasket.
Of course I forgot. My brain is essentially 2,875 sticky notes in a messy pile, so it comes as no surprise that adding one more to the chaos didn’t make the information stick. Now Mom’s diagnosis means I get to add a new batch of unhelpful notes to my muddled mind.
I flop back on the bed of my childhood room with a defeated exhale, staring at the spackled ceiling through tear-stained vision. I simply cannot be a thirty-one-year-old living in a room with fucking glow-in-the-dark stars across my ceiling. Sobbing, I stand on my bed and stretch until my ribs burn and I can barely lift my arms, peeling off every damn plastic star.
Like it or not, I’m moving back to Wells Canyon.