Chapter 32 EVE #2
LoverBoy shifts, settling more comfortably against me, and I continue.
“With kids, it’s different. I get to watch them grow, learn, develop confidence in managing their own bodies. And the position is part-time, which means I could also work on some ideas I have about connecting human and veterinary healthcare.”
“Like your mother’s hospital buddy program?”
I smile, remembering. After my diagnosis, Mom had organized volunteers to help patients’ families with everyday needs—grocery shopping, lawn care, pet sitting.
Simple things that become mountainous when someone you love is sick.
The important part wasn’t about asking “What can I do to help?” It was to give options, “This is what I can do to help. Which one would be the best for you right now? And then follow through.”
“Similar, but more integrated,” I explain. “Proper veterinary care available where human care is happening. Support for the whole family, including the four-legged members.”
“That sounds great.”
“I couldn’t have a visit of the support dog because it was too risky during transplant, but knowing your pet is well taken care of?
That helps.” I pause, thinking back at those years I’ve shoved so far down they used to hurt when they bubbled back up.
“Do you remember that summer after my first line and a half of treatment?” I ask into the phone, the miles between us somehow disappearing with his familiar voice.
“When you worked your way back to being in the water again?” Papet says, and I can hear the smile in his voice.
I nod even though he can’t see me. “I had no hair, no eyebrows... I was so worried about everything, but wanting to live so desperately. And then at the end of summer, I felt that riptide.”
“You called me about it later,” Papet recalls. “Said you felt the current change.”
“I did,” I confirm, the memory vivid even now. “One moment I was swimming, and the next I could feel the pull. But I recognized it immediately. I didn’t fight it—I just started swimming parallel to the shore like you and Dad and Mom always taught me.”
“You said something I’ve never forgotten,” Papet says. “You told me that while you were swimming sideways, watching the beach get further away before you could turn back, all you could think was...”
“I’m alive,” I finish for him. “After everything, despite everything, I was still here to feel a riptide. I wanted to scream it to the whole ocean.”
“And then after the transplant,” I continue, voice softer now, “when the neuropathy got worse and walking on sand became nearly impossible... I couldn’t even feel a riptide or the water.”
“I remember. I taught you to sail instead,” he says. “Found a way for you to be on the water that worked with where you were, not where you thought you should be.”
“That’s when you told me sailing isn’t about fighting the wind but understanding it. Working with it.”
“That’s right.”
“Maybe the ocean does teach us things,” I say. “Or maybe it’s just you, Papet.”
He chuckles. “And the day before you left for Chicago, we sat on that beach with your heart ornament. Just like we do every time you come home.”
“I’ve been thinking about all of it lately,” I admit. “The riptide, the sailing lessons, the sunrises we’ve watched together with that glass heart catching the light. Maybe coming home is like all of that. Not fighting against what was, but understanding how to move with who I am now.”
“Exactly,” he says, the pride in his voice wrapping around me like a warm blanket. “When did you get so wise?”
“I had a good teacher.”
There’s a comfortable silence, filled only with the distant sound of gulls from his end of the line.
“I haven’t told Mom and Dad yet,” I confess. “Or Adam.”
“They’ll be thrilled,” he says simply.
“What if I don’t get the job?”
“Then, you’ll find something else.”
And I voice another fear of mine that hadn’t left the confines of therapy. “What if I’m not enough? I made it. I’m here. And I’ve been trying to give back. Being a nurse was part of that.”
“You’re enough. You’ve always been enough. We don’t stay frozen in time, any of us. Your grandmother and I aren’t the same people who taught you to swim. Your parents aren’t the same people who brought you home from the hospital.”
“I thought having had cancer meant I’d knew better, though. I stayed with Chuck.”
“That man,” Papet says, his voice darkening like winter clouds.
I can almost hear Chuck’s voice in my head, clinical and dismissive: “Still making excuses for your choices, Eve.” But the thought flickers and fades like one of those Christmas lights that burns out, leaving only the warm, steady glow of Papet’s understanding.
For once, I don’t catalog Chuck’s criticism or mentally diagnose its impact.
I simply let it fade into the past where it belongs.
Papet continues, “Your heart always belongs to you. Even when you love someone. And that man didn’t only try to steal it, he tried to make it so it only beat when he was around. That’s not love. That’s possession.”
His words hit me with the precision of a perfectly delivered diagnosis, identifying exactly what I couldn’t articulate about Chuck all these years. Like when you finally see the pathology report that confirms what you suspected but couldn’t prove.
“That heart ornament I made you. Do you know why I created it?”
I glance at the dresser where the glass heart sits safely in its padded box, ready to be hung on whatever Christmas tree I find myself near each year.
“Because I was born?” I suggest, my throat tightening.
“Because I wanted you to have a physical reminder of how deeply you’re loved,” he says, his voice warm with decades of affection. “I hoped that even when you weren’t looking at it, you’d carry that feeling with you. Like a pocket of warmth in your chest even on your coldest days.”
I curl my fingers into my palm, the familiar triple-tap rhythm against my thigh slowing as his words penetrate the defensive barriers I’ve built around my heart. I’d always approached that ornament with the careful reverence of handling fragile lab specimens, but maybe that wasn’t the point at all.
“I made that heart when you came into our lives,” he continues. “But it found its true purpose during those long hospital stays, didn’t it? When you hung it where the light could catch it? I’ve always known that no matter how far apart we are, I’m in your heart just as you’re in mine.”
I nod, remembering how I’d positioned it to catch the morning light during my worst days, using it as a focus instead of the pain scale charts on the wall. “The nurses used to comment on it,” I tell him, my professional detachment slipping. “Said it was the prettiest thing.”
“That heart has witnessed your whole journey,” he adds. “From pigtails to college graduation. Through diagnosis and remission. From Pine Creek to Chicago and all the places between. It’s been your connection to home even when you couldn’t bring yourself to return.”
I mentally catalog the heart’s migrations: dorm room windows, hospital stands, Chuck’s designer Christmas tree (where it never quite belonged), and now this temporary B&B room. Like tracking a patient’s progress through different departments.
“I love that heart,” I whisper, my voice steady despite the pressure building behind my sternum. Not pain from a tumor pushing through or from unshed emotions, just feeling, raw and real and unfiltered by my usual clinical assessment.
“I know you do. That’s why I want you to bring it when you come home. So, we can celebrate the new year watching the sunrise catch its light. Together.”
After we say goodbye, I turn back to my laptop, LoverBoy still warm against my legs. The cursor still hovers over Submit, but my hand is steady now.
I think about Dr. Harrison Sr. and his journey back from losing his license.
I think about the kids I’ve connected with here.
I think about the emerging idea for integrated care.
And yes, I think about Adam, about shared mornings and inside jokes, about the way he makes me feel simultaneously safe and challenged. About whatever this is between us that I’m not quite ready to name but can’t bear to lose.
With Blanche watching approvingly, Dorothy arranging socks like puzzle pieces, and LoverBoy nestled against me, I click Submit.
The confirmation appears on screen, and I wait for the familiar adrenaline crash that usually follows major decisions.
It doesn’t come. Instead, there’s this strange lightness in my chest, what others might simply call hope.
No need to take my pulse or analyze my respiratory rate.
For once, I’m feeling it without the medical play-by-play.
Carefully moving LoverBoy to his bed, I close my laptop and set it aside, already imagining how I’ll tell Adam.
I’ll watch his face when I say the words, “I’m going back to the Cape,” and try to read what that means for us in those blue eyes that somehow always see through my carefully constructed walls.
I have no idea what he’ll say, how he’ll react. Whether this step will bring us closer or create new complications. But for the first time in years, I’m moving toward something instead of away from it. Choosing instead of running.
Outside, the afternoon sun catches on fresh snow, turning it into a canvas of gold and shadow. I can see my footprints from this morning’s walk with Dorothy, Blanche and Loverboy, already softening at the edges, but still visible. Still there.
I press my palm against the cool window glass, watching my breath create a small fog that fades almost instantly. The town looks different in this light, not because it’s changed, but because I’m seeing it differently.
Each path transformed not by becoming something else entirely, but by evolving, adding layers.
Like me.
Not the frightened girl in the hospital bed. Not Chuck’s perfect wife. Not the ice queen nurse.
Eve. All of me. Finally coming home to myself.