17. Holly
SEVENTEEN
HOLLY
Present Day - Six Years Later
“You okay?” Dr. Ellis Myers pushed away from the foot of the exam table.
“Great.” I gritted my teeth together until she came back, moved my feet back to the paper sheet-lined exam table, and shoved the stirrups away.
“Let me help you up.” She reached out and took my hand, pulling me back to a sitting position.
“You’ll have some cramping later today, maybe for the next two or three. You can take ibuprofen, but if it becomes too unbearable, call the office, and I’ll get a prescription sent in, okay?”
“Okay.” I sighed as I pushed my gown down. My head spun, and it wasn’t from lying down and letting her shove a needle up my hoo-ha and take a chunk of my flesh out with her.
Biopsy. Abnormal Pap smear. For the last two weeks my head had swum with fears and possibilities. All the hours I’d spent googling my symptoms was a bad idea.
Here I was, twenty-eight years old, getting a biopsy done on my uterus.
Nothing good could come of it.
“Any questions?”
I blinked and realized the doctor had kept talking.
Such was life these days. I lived with my head in the clouds, trying to fight against all the worst-case scenarios.
“How long?” I swallowed and tried to fight through my fears and worries. “How long until the results come back?”
The doctor’s expression told me she’d already said it, but she reached out and pressed her hand to my knee. “Up to two weeks at the latest, but I’ll try to work to get them back earlier. Rest , Holly, okay? You’re young. It’s probably just a scare. Don’t let your mind race to worst cases, okay? We’ll cross those bridges when we get there.”
I nodded, but my chin wobbled, and I closed my eyes.
“Jonah needs you strong and healthy, Holly. We’ll do whatever it takes, whatever the results. That, I promise you.”
“Thank you.” My voice broke as the first tear fell.
Dr. Myers tugged some tissues out of a box and brought them to me, and she pressed them into my palm. “Take all the time you need before getting dressed. Everything you’re feeling is totally normal, but don’t lose yourself to the worst fears, okay?”
“I’ll try.” I laughed and then cried and as she left the office with a soft, understanding smile, I blew my nose.
The biopsy was painful enough, but it wasn’t the beginning of the pain I’d suffered, and it wouldn’t be the last. Not with the luck I’d had in my life.
Dr. Myers was right, though. Jonah needed me. And a quick glance at my watch told me if I sat there crying and wallowing in my feels for too much longer, I’d be late picking him up.
Single mom life was a rocking life indeed.
I never regretted keeping Jonah and doing everything I had to do to work for us, but along the way, I lost all the rest of my hopes and dreams.
Getting cancer would truly be no surprise.
I slipped off the table and got dressed.
There was no time left for wallowing or thinking of the past.
What was done was done.
I stepped out of Dr. Myers’s office and headed down the hall. Dr. Myers had been my gynecologist for as long as I had been getting female exams. The shock in her eyes when I walked in with a six-month-old baby in my arms had been one amusing conversation.
“Um… did we miss a few appointments? ”
She’d eased the awkwardness with perfect comedic timing and had been encouraging ever since. At least I had a doctor who truly cared. I couldn’t imagine going through this with someone who was cold and clinical.
I hit the button for the elevator and stepped back to wait.
“Holly? Holly Jones?”
My spine straightened as a man called my name. I only came to Boone when I had to, but it’d been years since I worried about running into someone I knew.
I turned, and all the blood in my face fell to my toes.
His face broke out in a wide smile. “Holly freaking Jones. You’re really here! How’s it going?”
As he asked, he came rushing toward me. Decked out in blue scrubs and a long white coat with a stethoscope draped around his neck, Eli was no less handsome than he’d always been. In fact, age, and it appeared, med school, had been kind to him.
“Hi, Eli.” I barely got it out before his arms were wrapped around me, hugging me tight. It took me by surprise, the fact that one of Graham’s friends would dare to speak to me, much less touch me, after the way everything with us ended all those years ago, but there he was, hugging me like he’d seen me yesterday.
After tensing for a second, I returned his hug.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” he said and pulled back. “How are you? You look great.”
“Um…” I glanced down the hall and back to him. This was one of Graham’s friends. A guy I’d hurt and hadn’t done it kindly. He was the first guy, the only guy, I could have really seen myself having a life with. Everything crashed and exploded to the ground when I learned my own father had been responsible for killing one of Graham’s friends.
It was Eli who warned me to stay away from Graham if I wasn’t serious about him in the first place. I should have heeded that advice the moment he said it. I didn’t, which was why I was surprised that he was being so kind.
“I should go,” I told him. “It was good seeing you.”
“Don’t.” He reached out his arm to stop me from moving toward the elevator. “Catch up for a second, would you? I hardly get to leave this building, and it’s good to see someone I know. I just…I can’t believe you’re here. I thought you would have taken off after graduation.”
His brow furrowed, like he was trying to remember the past, and he was slowly working to put the pieces together.
“We all thought you left. You vanished.”
“Things changed.” I shrugged and shuffled on my feet. And still, even all the years later, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what happened. Didn’t want to risk it getting back to Graham. But that was silly. It’d been years . My best friend Tracey still kept in contact with Graham’s friend, Tanner, and I knew he’d never said anything.
Still, I couldn’t open my mouth to say anything.
“You were here?” He shook his head. “Or in Deer Creek this whole time? Does Graham?—”
“Don’t.” I held up my hand. “It was really great seeing you, Eli. But I need to go.”
Jonah was at a hockey camp. The day he told me he wanted to learn to play, my heart broke a little bit. I’d do anything for him, though, even sitting through all his Mini-Mite games, cheering him on with my whole heart, while half my mind was on the past. The past that was now standing in front of me.
I needed to go .
“Miss Jones?”
I turned at the sound of my name. One of Dr. Myers’s nurses headed toward me. She gave Eli a cursory glance before holding out a card for me.
My heart stalled. Not for what she was about to say, but for who was listening.
“Yes?”
“Dr. Myers wanted you to have this.” She held out a small card.
I took it like a snake waiting to strike my inner wrist. “Okay…”
“It has her cell. She said to tell you if you need to talk, or if you’re worried, call her personal phone while you wait for your biopsy results to come in.”
“Biopsy?” Eli asked. His glance at the nurse or me wasn’t cursory. “What’s going on, Holly?”
His tone was too thick, suddenly too worrisome.
If only there was a bridge nearby, one with a large amount of space between water and cement.
Thank you,” I managed to mumble.
I shoved past Eli and rushed toward the stairs. Screw the elevator.
I needed to get out of there. Away from Eli, away from the past that haunted me every day, and away from the fear of the future that was coming.
Fortunately, footsteps didn’t follow me.
Just the constant thumping in my own brain reminding me that for me, life would always suck, always be hard, and there was nothing I could do to escape it.