Chapter 54
Chapter Fifty-Four
HAPPILY EVER AFTER
Will
I find her asleep in our bed. Arden never naps, or she didn't, before. She used to joke that she'd sleep when she was dead, which isn't funny anymore , not even in that dark way she sometimes needs it to be. The sight of her curled on her side of the bed stops me in the doorway, my messenger bag still slung across my chest, full of student essays about Baroque architecture that feels impossibly trivial.
The house is quiet in a way that it feels like holding its breath. Even the maple tree outside our window, the one that usually tap-tap-taps against the glass like an impatient visitor, seems to have stilled its branches to respect the moment she needs. I remember the day we bought this house, how Arden had spun in circles in every empty room, her laughter seeping into the bare walls. Walls we didn’t keep bare for long.
We had good years after the first diagnosis. Years of clear scans and cautious optimism, of planning trips we'd take and arguing about what color to paint the guest room. Years of almost believing we'd dodged the bullet, that we were the lucky ones, that statistics were just numbers on a page that had nothing to do with us. Now those years feel like a cruel joke, like one of those trompe l'oeil paintings where something that looks real until you reach out to touch it and your hand meets flat canvas instead of depth.
‘It’s not fair,’ I said to her recently. A childish remark as I braced myself against the kitchen island gripping it for my own stability. My head hanging low as I stared at my own feet begging them to carry us all away from this.
‘It’s actually incredibly fair,’ she replied with an infuriating amount of honesty. ‘It patently sucks. It’s completely frustrating. It’s all around the shittiest of things to ever happen to us… but, it’s not unfair. I’ve spent so much time thinking why me, why us? But we’ve had everything. Why anyone else and not us?’
I set my bag down quietly, trying not to wake her, but the old floorboard by the door creaks, the one we talk about fixing but somehow never do. And she stirs ever so slightly at my tattletale step, her face scrunching in that way that always reminds me of Banks when she was little, fighting sleep with every fiber of her being.
"Hey, stranger," she mumbles, not fully opening her eyes. "Come be horizontal with me."
She must have been reading when she dozed off as the book lays next to her patiently waiting for her to return to their shared adventure.
I toe off my shoes and climb onto the bed beside her, still in my work clothes, my shirt getting hopelessly wrinkled with folds of this moment. She immediately curls into me like a quotation mark seeking its pair as her head finds the spot on my chest that she has been permanently indented by her profile over time.
‘ Well, at least I'll finally get some sleep.’ She’d said when we got the news. She'd been right about that, in the cruel ironic way the universe sometimes has of granting wishes. Though we never wished for sleep. We spent nights watching the moon from our bedroom window, from Banks’s nursery window, from our front steps, from anywhere we could. Never afraid of sleepless nights or what the sunrise would bring.
"How was your day, Professor?" she asks, her voice and dry still thick with sleep. "Did you dazzle young minds with tales of dead artists and their influences?"
"Today was a riveting lecture on the architectural significance of flying buttresses." I press a handful of kisses plus one to the top of her head. "Only two students fell asleep this time, so I'm counting it as a win."
She snorts against my chest. "Defending Gothic Architecture to students who probably were just hoping you’d make some kind of butt joke," she teases, her voice muffled by my shirt. I run my fingers through her hair, threads of gold with hints of silver.
"How about you?” I ask softly, matching her quiet tone. “Productive day of horizontal contemplation?"
"Oh, very productive. I've been lying here thinking about running away."
"Where are we running to this time?" I play along, the way I always do.
“No where this time,” she breathes, each word careful and measured. “Not us, just me.”
“Arden…” Her name clings to my lips as a desperate two-syllable plea.
“Will…” She uses mine in protest.
"Do you ever feel like we've lived this life before?" she asks quietly, her voice soft in the stillness of our bedroom. Her fingers follow the familiar lines of my palm, each known crease and paper-grading callus with the precision of a cartographer. With her ear pressed against my chest I know she can feel my heartbeat steady beneath her.
"I sometimes think that we could have had another hundred years together, and it wouldn't have been enough. I would never have been able to fit all my love for you into just this one lifetime," she confesses into the quiet space between heartbeats. She pauses, watching sunspots dance in the beams streaming through the window. "So we leave pieces of it behind, don't we? We pass it on to Banks, this love that's too big for one life to hold. We leave it tucked between the pages of books she'll read someday, hung on walls in photographs she'll show her children. And when I have to leave this world before you," her voice breaks, "because I will,” she continues, “I'll build our new house, wherever I end up. I'll fill it with all the love that couldn't fit here, because this one world, this one lifetime was never going to be enough to contain it all."
My hand finds her cheek, thumb brushing across the roundness of it. Her eyes are clear now, more awake than she's been all afternoon.
"I don't know what's going to happen, Will. I don't know if any book got it right, if any dream holds the truth. I don’t know if I’ll be able to take any of it with me. All these memories we've made, this life we've built together. Do I just pack them up like precious treasures in a suitcase? Choose the minutes and moments I love most and carry them with me when I go?" She shifts to look at me fully, her eyes bright with unshed tears. "I'll board whatever transport the universe has waiting, heading to whatever destination has been planned. It's not fear I feel when I think about it, but it is envy for all the things I'll have to leave behind."
Her voice grows stronger, more certain. "But I need you to know something. When it's time, I'll go with more gratitude than sadness, because this life… this beautiful life with you and Banks, with the families we chose, and even the ones we haven't, it's been well lived, and so well loved. Because this time, it will be my turn to build the future you can't see yet. And I'll be there waiting, patient and sure, until it's time for you to find me again.”
Her voice drops to a whisper and a plea, not the kind I make in every moment of silence I can find, but one for my ears only.
“But please, my love, for everything we've built and everything we are, don't rush. Let time unfold the way it's meant to for once. And when you meet me, whenever, wherever that may be, you’ll sink into the warm bath behind me and tell me all the small things I missed from the day.”
I want to argue, to rage against this quiet acceptance, this gentle planning for an after I refuse to contemplate. But she's right, as she's always been right about the important things. Except one. The thing that mattered most. The love she has for me, that turned into the love of so much more. My brilliant wife, who can take even this darkest moment and transform it into a promise for a future.
“Now, Will, can you please tell me about your day and the flying buttresses… and there better be at least one ass-joke.”
I can feel my own tears trailing the lines of my face that we earned together as she moves from one topic to another with the implication they are equal in density of discussion. But there’s no request I wouldn’t grant her.
"Well, for starters… they support what seems impossible," I whisper into her hair.
“Oh yeah, tell me more…”
“What's really beautiful is that they turned a structural necessity into art. These buttresses could have been purely functional, but they look like they are holding up heaven. It's like they refused to accept the limitations of gravity.”
So I lie here, being her buttress, and I pray to every god I've ever lectured about to grant us more time. So I can pretend, just for a little while , that we can exist here together, that we have all the time in the world.
I pull the blanket over us, as she settles back into me to rest more deeply with the vibration of my voice. She's already drifting off, her breathing evening out into the rhythm I know better than my own heartbeat. And as she does, I am lost to her, as I always have been, in all the ways I will remain long past this moment and any to come.