18. Trent
18
TRENT
“ H ow’re things going?” I asked as Sofia greeted me at the door of Nana Dee’s place.
She shrugged, tucking her stethoscope into the pocket of her nursing scrubs. “She hasn’t had the energy to get out of bed yet. Sounds like maybe she overdid it at the party.”
I closed the door quietly behind me, not wanting to disturb Dee if she’d gone back to sleep. When Sofia had reached out this morning, it was to tell me that Nana Dee had a rough night. “How’s her breathing?”
“Better now. But I’m worried she’s developing a cough.”
I winced. I knew how dangerous it was for her to develop a chest infection when she was already struggling to breathe. “You think she picked up something at the party yesterday?”
“Seems too quick for it to be from that. I’ll keep an eye on it. Let me know if you think she needs to make an appointment with her doctor.”
I ran my hand down my face. This was not the news I wanted this morning. Sofia put her hand on my arm and squeezed my elbow. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah, I guess I…” I shrugged. “Well, maybe it was naive of me, but I sort of thought she’d been improving.” Especially since meeting Natasha.
Sofia’s mouth stretched into a thin line. “Trent, you know there’s no reality where Dee just gets better, right? Not without intervention.”
“I know.” Despite how much I wanted it, I knew Dee wasn’t going to magically recover from heart failure. It didn’t work like that. “What I meant was…she’s seemed more energetic these past weeks. More engaged than she’s been since her diagnosis. She started coming into the office again for our lunch dates. She visited with the staff. She attended things with the guys, like Hailey’s party.”
“Sounds like she made an effort for you,” Sofia said, smiling softly. “She does nothing but talk my ear off about how much she loves Natasha, and how good she is for you.”
The corner of my mouth twitched. Natasha had been good for us both. But I couldn’t bring myself to fully smile when the situation was so grim. I didn’t need Dee to make an effort for me. I needed her to make one for herself.
“I need her to want this surgery, Sofia.”
“I know.”
“To want more time with me and her Lost Boys.” I’d hoped this whole fake relationship I’d started with Natasha might spur her to get treatment so she could be around for all these new milestones. But what if it had the opposite effect? What if Dee felt that she could let go now that I seemed to be happily settled?
“You can’t force her into these decisions,” Sofia said, sighing heavily. “No matter how much you want to. I know it’s hard, but you have to respect her right to make what she thinks is the best decision for herself.”
“It’s not the best decision,” I said, the words more of a growl than I’d intended. “She’s just scared. Too afraid to fight after watching what my grandfather went through. She’s given up without even trying.”
“Maybe,” Sofia said. “But that, too, is something for Dee to work out.”
“I can’t just sit here and let the disease take her.”
“The best thing you can do for Dee right now is support her decisions.”
“I don’t know how to do that,” I said through gritted teeth.
“You are doing it,” Sofia said, squeezing my arm again. “Just like this. You show up and you be there for her. That’s it.”
“It’s not enough.” I was failing Dee. Everything else in my life seemed to be so wonderful. The new line was progressing beautifully. We’d have a couple pieces ready for the trade show at the end of the month. Things with Natasha were more than good. But none of that mattered if I lost Dee.
“Why don’t you go up and sit with her for a while?” Sofia suggested. “It’ll be good for you both. Plus, I need a break from all the princess talk,” she teased.
“Yeah, there was sure a lot of that yesterday,” I muttered. “Dee got very invested in playing with the kids. I think they crowned her queen at one point.”
Sofia chuckled. “I’m glad she had a good time. But she needs to remember not to push herself so hard.”
I should have known better. “Maybe I should have taken her home after an hour.”
Sofia tutted. “I don’t think Dee would have listened to either of us if she was determined to be at that party.”
She was stubborn. I knew that. If not, I’d have already scheduled her for this surgery.
Sofia inclined her head toward the stairs. “Go on. She knows you were on your way. If you don’t get up there soon, she’ll start complaining that we’re gossiping about her.”
That got a bit of a smile out of me. If nothing else, I could always rely on Dee complaining about that. “I’ll talk to you later,” I said as I headed upstairs for Dee’s bedroom.
The long hallway had a plush runner, and the walls were adorned with framed photos. Most of them were of me and Jimmy—baby photos, graduation photos, us at the lake house, me and the Lost Boys, Jimmy and his favorite dog, Spud. This hallway was like a time capsule of our life with Dee, and I wasn’t ready to give that up.
I knocked on the door at the end of the hall, pushing it open when Dee called out. She lay in the middle of her massive four-poster bed, the newspaper unfurled in her lap. She looked incredibly tiny propped up on the plush pillows. The whir of her oxygen tank filled the room. I swallowed the bile that filled my mouth.
“Morning.”
“There you are,” she said. She looked pointedly at the chair next to her bed. “I would have met you at the door, but I’ve been instructed to rest.”
I crossed the room, kissed her on the cheek, then slid into the chair. She passed me a page from the newspaper. I had no interest in reading it as I kept her company, my thoughts too heavy. “How’re you feeling?” I asked.
“Oh, fine,” she said. I knew she was lying. She lifted her phone in my direction. “Look at these.”
It was a group chat between Dee, Piper, Chloe, and Cora. An errant part of me wondered if Natasha would one day be part of the group. Then a horrible thought entered my mind, and I wondered if Dee would even be around long enough to add her.
“The girls have been sending me photos from yesterday,” Dee explained. “Doesn’t Hailey look precious?”
I tried to focus on the pictures, to be present with Dee at this moment and not think about losing her. “We should frame that one of you and Violet.”
“I agree.”
We scrolled through the rest of the photos. Natasha and I featured in a lot of them, too lost in each other to even realize there were cameras pointed our way. I’d clearly spent too much time wrapped up in her and not enough time keeping an eye on Dee. That didn’t seem to matter to Dee though. She simply beamed down at the photos.
“They look happy, don’t they?” Dee said, pointing out Stacy and Dominic in one of the photos. “She’s a nice girl. You know she’s a costume designer?”
I nodded. “You don’t think it’s a little soon for him to be moving on?”
“No,” Dee said simply. “They seem to get on well. She was positively doting on Hailey yesterday. What would be the point in Dominic denying himself that happiness?”
“I obviously want to see him happy. I guess I just got used to seeing him unhappy all the time, thanks to the custody drama. It hasn’t been that long since the divorce finally wrapped up. I figured he’d be happy to fly solo for a while.”
“Life doesn’t just stop moving when we lose something,” Dee said.
I swallowed hard, glaring at the wall across the room. I knew she wasn’t talking about herself, but I couldn’t help thinking that life would stop when Jimmy and I lost her.
“He’s closed the door on Amanda. If Stacy’s here now, why not see where it could go? Love doesn’t operate on any kind of timeline,” Dee said.
No, the only one with a timeline here was her. I gritted my teeth. “I guess.”
She reached out and squeezed my hand. “Soon none of my Lost Boys will be lost anymore. Especially you.” She looked deeply pleased at the thought.
“I wouldn’t say I was lost,” I muttered.
“Oh, please.” Dee waved off my comment. “Natasha’s brought you to life. I’ve never seen you more excited to get into the office or to talk about furniture lines.” She lifted her hand, placing it on my cheek. It was soft and weathered and wrinkled. She seemed so fragile. My heart clenched. “I’m so glad you haven’t let your past experiences keep you from finding love, Trent.”
Yeah, sure. Whatever. As long as I glossed over the whole fake part of my relationship with Natasha, we could say I’d been looking for love. I cleared my throat. “Well, I had a terrific example in you and Papa Davis. Even if things weren’t as great at home, I always had you two to look up to.”
“I’m glad we could give you that,” Dee said. “I know how much you struggled.”
I shrugged off her comment. “It’s ancient history now.”
“But we carry that history with us whether we realize it or not. And I think it’s important you do acknowledge that, to make sure it doesn’t affect your relationship with Natasha.”
She’d been there to comfort me through my breakups with Tessa and Katie, but I knew she wasn’t thinking about them. No, she was referring to my parents.
They’d never had much interest in parenting. Growing up, they’d always been cold, dismissive. Distant. Work was all that mattered to them. They figured they’d done their parental duty by hiring nannies and housekeepers to make sure I was fed and clean. They would mostly just check in to make sure I was keeping my grades up and not doing anything to embarrass the family. By the time I was a teenager, I started acting out on purpose just to get a reaction out of them. I’d thought that negative attention would be better than no attention, but instead of cracking down to get me to toe the line, they just washed their hands of me. Without Nana Dee and Papa Davis, I’m not sure where I’d have ended up.
Jimmy was the oopsie baby, conceived during a “second honeymoon” where they tried to patch up their failing marriage, away on an island, far from all the other women Dad wouldn’t stop screwing. But instead of bringing them together, Jimmy just gave them another reason to snipe at each other until everything finally fell apart five years ago.
“I’d never treat Natasha the way Dad treated Mom,” I snarled, disgusted at the thought of his rampant, flagrant cheating. “Or the way Mom treated Dad.” Mom wasn’t a cheater—she was a needler, picking at every flaw, every insecurity. Turning everything into a fight. They’d both poisoned their relationship in their own ways, and I wanted none of it. Just like I wanted nothing to do with either one of them.
Dee patted my hand. “I know. I’m so proud of the man you’ve become, even if I wish your parents had done more to help you along the way.”
I snorted. “I’m glad they didn’t. I was better off without them. I’d be even better off now if they’d go back to leaving me the hell alone.”
Dee let out a sigh. “I think it’s hurt their pride, how well you’re doing with the company after they had to be kicked out for running it into the ground. They just want to feel like they’re still a part of things—and the only way to do that now is through you.”
“There’s no way I would ever follow any advice from them,” I scoffed. “But if they’d take some advice from me, it would be to stop calling me and start calling Jimmy. He’s the one who could really use some love and support right now.”
“He has love and support,” Nana Dee pointed out. “Because he has us.”
My emotions boiled over. “But if you don’t get treatment, neither Jimmy nor I will have you for much longer,” I bit back.
Dee grew quiet. A muscle in her cheek twitched, and I tried to swallow down my frustration. I hadn’t meant to upset her. “You know my feelings on this.”
“I do,” I said. “But I also see the way it’s wearing on you, and it doesn’t have to. You could have the surgery.”
“I don’t want the surgery.”
“But this is what you want? To be exhausted and sick, stuck in bed until the end?” I didn’t want to guilt-trip her into a treatment she’d decided against, but I hated the thought of watching her suffer just as much as I hated the thought of losing her. She was the glue that held our family together—the part of it that mattered, anyway—and I couldn’t believe she was considering going down without a fight. What was I supposed to do without her?
“Trent—” she said, her voice far too calm.
“What the hell do I know about holding this family together?” I said.
She squeezed my hand. “You’ll manage.”
What if I didn’t, though? What if I was just like my parents, and all I managed to do was tear things further apart?