Chapter 8 Miles
Istared at my phone for twenty minutes before typing the message.
Miles
Can you meet me tomorrow? At the river. Our spot.
My finger hovered over send. This was either the bravest thing I'd ever done or the most cowardly, I genuinely couldn't tell which.
Both options felt like betrayal. Letting her in meant tying her to a sinking ship.
Pushing her away meant losing the only person who'd ever made me feel like I was enough.
But with the way my tremors and memory worsened at an unpredictable rate this week, pushing Charlotte away felt like a great idea.
"Just send it," I muttered to the empty room. "Stop being a coward."
I pressed send before I could talk myself out of it.
Her response came almost instantly, like she'd been waiting.
Charlotte
Yes. What time?
Me
4 PM.
Charlotte
I'll be there.
Three words. No questions, no hesitation, no demand for explanation. Just I'll be there.
I set the phone down and pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars. Tomorrow, I would either let her in or push her away forever. I had twenty-four hours to figure out which choice was love and which was self-destruction.
"They might be the same thing," I told myself as sleep slowly washed over me. "Has that occurred to you?"
I spent the early morning rehearsing speeches in my head, which is a completely normal and healthy thing to do.
By noon, I'd mentally prepared approximately twelve different versions of "here's why you should run away from me as fast as possible," each more dramatic than the last.
Thirty minutes after that, I'd scrapped them all. By three o'clock, I was sitting in my car in the parking lot near the river, my hands trembling on the steering wheel, no closer to knowing what I was going to say.
"Come on," Nerves were eating me up inside. "You're a lawyer. You argue for a living. You can do this."
Arguing for a living was very different from arguing against the only woman I'd ever loved. But I got out of the car anyway.
The old oak tree stood sentinel by the water, its branches bare against the gray November sky. Fifteen years ago, I'd kissed Charlotte under those branches for the first time, nervous and clumsy and completely certain I was the luckiest person alive.
Now I was back, carrying a different kind of insecurity. The setting felt appropriate. Poetic, even, if you were into that sort of self-inflicted symbolism.
She was already there.
Charlotte leaned against the trunk of the oak, her arms wrapped around herself against the chill. She wore a dark green coat that made her eyes look like deep forest pools, and her expression was careful, not quite worried, not quite calm.
Watchful.
Ready.
"Hi," she said as I approached, my footsteps careful on the frost-tinged grass.
"Hi." I stopped a few feet from her, the space between us feeling vast and charged. "You came."
"I said I would." She tilted her head, studying me. "You look like you haven't slept."
"I haven't."
"That's not great for someone who's supposed to be managing a chronic condition."
"Thank you for the medical opinion. Very helpful."
A ghost of a smile crossed her face. "Someone has to keep you accountable." She gestured to the flat, moss-covered rock we used to sit on during our skipped classes. "Should we sit? This feels like a sitting conversation."
"It's a tough conversation," I said quietly.
"I figured." She sat down on the rock, leaving space beside her. "That's why I'm here."
I sat, not touching her, the cold of the stone seeping through my jeans immediately. The river murmured past us, the same river that had witnessed our first kiss. Now it would witness whatever this was: ending or beginning, I still didn't know.
"Charlotte." I stared at the water because looking at her made it harder to say what I needed to say. "What you offered at the house some days ago, helping with the exercises, the meals, being there, it is the kindest thing anyone has ever offered me."
"I sense a 'but' coming."
"A big one." I forced myself to turn and meet her eyes. "I can't accept it. Not until you understand what you'd actually be signing up for."
She didn't flinch. "Then explain it to me."
So I did. Not the sanitized version, not the "managing a condition" spin. The brutal, clinical truth.
"I have early-onset Parkinson's disease, which you already know," I began. "It's degenerative. Progressive. There is no cure."
"I know what Parkinson's is, Miles." Her voice was gentle but firm. "I'm a nurse."
"Then you know the medications help with symptoms, but don't stop the progression. You know I might not get better." I swallowed hard. "In fact, I will almost certainly get worse."
"That's one possibility."
"It's the most likely possibility." I pushed on, needing her to see the full picture. "It starts with the tremor, the stiffness. But it moves to gait, to balance. I'll lose coordination. Simple tasks will become struggles, then impossibilities."
"I've seen Parkinson's patients—"
"Independence goes next," I continued, the words coming faster now. "Driving. Dressing. Feeding myself. You could spend years watching that happen. A relationship that starts as a partnership, transforming into caregiving. Love curdling into obligation. Into resentment."
"You're dooming yourself."
"I'm being realistic." I turned to face her fully. "And that's not even the worst part."
She waited, her expression unreadable.
"The cognitive decline." The words felt like swallowing glass. "The dementia. With my particular genetic situation, it's not just possible, it's likely. And it's already starting."
Now I had her full attention. Her nurse's mask slipped slightly, revealing something that might have been fear.
"You asked about my father," I said, my voice dropping. "I didn’t get the chance to say everything, so let me tell you what his last year looked like."
I drew a shaky breath. This was the part I'd never told anyone. The part I'd carried alone for three years, a weight so heavy it had reshaped my entire understanding of love and loss.
"The dementia stole him piece by piece. First, it was names, he'd call me by my uncle's name, then correct himself.
Then it was dates, events, the sequence of his own life, scrambling like a dropped deck of cards.
Then it was how to use a fork. How to find the bathroom in a house he'd lived in for forty years. "
Charlotte's hand moved toward mine, then stopped. She was listening.
"The final month…" My voice cracked. "He didn't know who I was. This man, this brilliant, controlled, formidable man who'd shaped my entire life with the force of his will... he'd look at me with these blank, terrified eyes. He'd ask who I was. When his wife was coming home."
A hot tear escaped, tracing a cold path down my cheek. "He didn't remember she'd died six months before. Every time I told him, it was fresh grief. So I stopped telling him. I just said she'd be back soon."
"Miles—"
"The pain of that." I wiped my face roughly with the back of my hand. "Seeing someone you love look at you like a stranger. Being completely unable to reach them, to comfort them, to make them understand that you're safe. It's a special kind of hell."
I turned to look at her directly, needing her to see the full weight of what I was carrying.
"And the fear that I am marching toward that same hell, that I could one day look at you and not know you, not remember loving you, not remember any of the moments we build together—" My resolve remained firm despite the despair I was feeling on the inside. "I can't do that to you. I won't."
I said the words I'd been rehearsing all night, the words I'd convinced myself were love: "You deserve better than this, Charlotte.
You deserve someone whole. Someone with a future you can build on, not one you have to brace against." I forced myself to hold her gaze.
"You deserve someone who won't forget your name. "
Silence. The river murmured. A bird called somewhere in the bare branches above us.
I expected tears. I expected the soft, sad agreement I'd been bracing for, ‘You're right. This is too much. I understand.’
What I got was anger.
It didn't explode. It crystallized. Her eyes, which had been soft with compassion, turned sharp and blazing with green fire.
"You don't get to decide what I deserve."
Her voice was low, but it cut through the river's murmur like a blade. She stood up from the rock, her whole body taut with controlled fury.
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me." She stepped toward me, her gaze pinning me in place. "You don't get to make this choice for me like I'm a child. Like I'm incapable of understanding my own life and my own limits."
"I'm trying to protect—"
"You're trying to control." She cut me off sharply. "That's what this is. You're terrified of the pain, so you're trying to control the outcome. You decide what's best for me, you make the unilateral choice, you get to be the tragic hero sacrificing his own happiness—"
"That's not fair."
"It's completely fair." Her voice rose. "And in the process, you rob me of my agency. You treat my love, my choice, like it's irrelevant. Like I'm too stupid or too naive to understand what I'd be agreeing to."
Her conviction cut me with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. I wanted to argue, but the truth in it was paralyzing.
"I've watched people die, Miles." Her voice cracked slightly.
"I've held their hands at three in the morning.
I've explained prognoses to families who didn't want to hear them.
I've seen more endings than you can imagine.
" She stepped closer, her eyes fierce. "Don't you dare tell me I don't understand what disease looks like.
Don't you dare pretend I'm walking into this blind. "
"It's different when it's someone you love—"