Chapter 33
Courtney and Thea’s historical romance–themed engagement party was in full swing at the restaurant, but Nic was under the eaves in the garden, crushing a star-shaped flower between his fingers. The cloying sweetness on the breeze couldn’t chase away the foul bile trying to climb up his throat.
Nic shut his eyes and covered his ears at an eruption of laughter from inside.
Marshall Greene sure knew how to put on a party.
The costumes. The decorations. The people.
So many people. Courtney and Thea deserved all of it.
They deserved their perfect happy ending and their potbellied pig they kept talking about adopting someday.
He hated that he couldn’t mask everything he was feeling for a second longer. At least he had made it through a toast and watching the couple cut a silly cake in a preview of the wedding to come in the spring.
A wedding Jeannie might not make it to.
Nic still wasn’t sure if Marshall would take him up on his offer to come on as a chef for a year. He’d asked Marshall on a whim after overhearing a conversation that left Nic feeling absolutely helpless.
Jeannie was dying.
And he was reacting to the news like the angry, stupid, selfish child he’d thought he’d left behind over a decade ago.
He wished for the numbness he’d found in his teenage years. God, this hurt. It hurt worse than the physical pain from his father. Or the emptiness from his mother’s neglect. It felt like being torn apart by a dragon.
He had lost so many people.
But nothing like this.
And she wasn’t even gone yet.
“I knew I’d find you out here.” Jeannie wore a blue Regency dress, her steel-gray hair in an elegant bun on top of her head. He had never imagined what Jeannie might look like in a dress. She was usually in overalls and covered with dirt.
Her high cheekbones even had a whisper of makeup on them.
“Guess I should’ve picked a better place, then. Suppose hiding in your garden was a half-assed way to escape.” Lying here in the spot beneath the jasmine, he was struck by how much he had changed in twelve years. His voice especially.
It had deepened from more than a decade spent yelling over kitchen noise and breathing in grill smoke giving it texture. Jeannie was the first one to comment on it. He’d also stopped picking up accents when he traveled, because he’d been in Texas so long now that it had become his first real home.
He’d gained weight, both muscle and the sort one gains while living in kitchens, never wanting to be the type of chef who doesn’t test his own work. He enjoyed food.
He enjoyed life.
She had given him permission to live like that.
“How long, Jeannie?”
“I found out a few months ago.”
“And you’re not even going to try?”
Jeannie blew a whistling breath through pursed lips. “Kid, trying in this case means enduring months of torture for maybe a few more weeks. I dealt with this before. I know what it’s like. To put it in terms that the Texan in you understands, this ain’t my first rodeo, kid.”
“When?”
“When what? When do I plan on shuffling off this mortal coil? Not sure. I’ll let you know.” Her voice was more wry than bitter. “Put you on my death telegram list.”
“No, I meant when did you deal with this before?”
“Not sure why that detail matters to you.” She sat beside him and fanned her dress out.
In the dimness of the garden, the dress might have been white.
It could have been a dress someone might wear to a Celtic Heritage Society’s Twelfth Annual Beltane Bonfire Night and whatever other words Felicity had used that night.
“I want to know. Stuff’s gotten better though. One of my colleagues beat it, and her scans looked—”
“I’m sure things have improved a lot in thirty years, but I’ve gotten three opinions on this. I’ve seen every expert, just to make sure.”
“If it’s a money thing, I’ll pay—”
“It’s about the limits of science and the bounds of whatever deity anyone believes in. I’m not sure which part of my private conversation you overheard earlier.” She tugged Nic’s ear. “But I’m not doing nothing. I’m trying to have a comfortable life for as long as I have one.”
“Swear?”
“Yes.”
“How long you been clean, Nicky?”
He sniffled and wiped his nose on the sleeve of the stupid-looking costume shirt he was wearing. “I don’t know. Didn’t come prepared with the number this time.”
She nodded but didn’t ask again. She reached above her head and pulled a bloom off the bower and handed it to him.
For a moment, it looked like she was going to say something else, but then thought better of it.
“Fix your face, kid. That sweet cousin of yours deserves to have you celebrating with her.”
“I won’t tell anyone.” A child’s voice had come out of his grown man’s mouth. Tentative and frightened like a little boy with a playground secret.
“Damn right you won’t.”
She pushed to standing and left him alone.
When he could breathe normally again, Nic stood. A man was seated on the bench beneath the old metal fire escape. He wore glasses and had moonlight-white hair. It was the same man she had been talking to before when he found out about the cancer.
He beckoned Nic to join him on the bench and extended a hand. “Dexter Greene.”
“Marshall’s dad?”
“The very same.” Dexter Greene’s eyes were a glassy blue.
He rubbed the white stubble over his chin and jaw.
“Last time she was sick, it was when her husband was stepping out on her. She was lucky that time. She missed chemo appointments and nearly ran herself ragged over a man who … well, suffice to say, he didn’t deserve it.
She always thought she could do it all alone. ”
“But she beat it.”
“She did.”
“But she won’t this time?”
Dexter Greene rested a shaking hand on Nic’s knee and shook his head.
“But she won’t be alone this time?”
“Not for a single second.”
“No one else knows?”
“Not until she’s ready for them to know.” This statement wasn’t a question. It was a demand. Almost a threat. And given that the man was at least as tall as his son, the threat part definitely landed.
“Okay.”
Nic had been up half the night after the party. He had gone back in and danced with everyone, the only way to keep the impending nightmare at bay to pretend that it did not exist.
His craving for numbness scared him.
It scared him enough that he called an old friend from rehab. While Nic wasn’t sober in the strictest definition of the word, he hadn’t used drugs since the night he met Felicity.
Luckily, overnight he had found a research project to distract him from everything else.
On his way out of town, he pulled into a parking lot near an old Baptist church. He marched through the lines of headstones until he found the one he was looking for.
Paul Keegan.
“I might be clean, but I’m not an angel either.”
And Nic spat onto the headstone and walked back to his truck.