Chapter “I don’t know.” #2
Daniel plops my bags down and sits on the edge of the bed. “Oscar.”
I close my eyes and shake my head. “What have you done? I told you never to tell him.”
He pulls his shoulders up and drops them with a heavy sigh. I’ve drained him. “It felt like a life-or-death situation. I knew he’d know how to find you.”
“He’s going to break out.”
Daniel shakes his head. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you told him his baby girl is dying!”
Daniel winces.
I pace the room. “You have to go back and tell him I’m fine. If he breaks out, he will be a fugitive forever, but if he serves his time, then he can be free again. You have to go back. You have to—”
“We.”
I stop and narrow my eyes at him. “Sorry?”
“We. We will go back and tell him you’re fine, even though you’re not completely fine. Stage one cancer is still cancer.”
“Daniel … I’m not going back.” It feels like I’m giving a five-year-old instructions—soft and slow.
He shakes his head and reaches for my hand, pulling me to stand between his legs.
“Scarlet …” He presses my hand to his chest. I feel his scar beneath his shirt.
“You’re my heart. I lived for you. It’s a miracle that I’m even alive, but I am.
And so are you. We are two miracles. Don’t you see that?
In spite of everything, we’re meant to be together. The cheating doesn’t—”
“Whoa.” I step back. “I didn’t cheat on you. We weren’t together.”
“We were engaged.” He jumps to his feet. I take another step back.
“Were. I left you—I left us. I grieved you and what we had.”
“By jumping into bed with another man?”
I turn and look out the window. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to apologize for. Having cancer? Choosing to live my last days on my own terms? Finding comfort in the touch of another man when I thought I was going to die? Or not actually dying?”
“Tell me it was just sex, Scarlet. Tell me you didn’t really mean what you said to him. Tell me—”
“It was nothing.” I face him again, emotions burning my eyes. “It was a lie. But at some point that lie became my greatest truth. And that ‘nothing’ turned into something that right now feels like everything. Now I’m left with the cold reality that we were the lie, Daniel.”
His face contorts into a mask of confusion. “What are you talking about?”
I forgave myself for this when my death seemed imminent. Now I need to let go of it in order to live.
“When you were in the hospital…” I draw in a shaky breath as the past slams into me again “…and the doctors said you needed a heart transplant soon or you were going to die, I panicked.”
Daniel’s eyes narrow. “We all did.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t just panic. I did something …”
“What do you mean?”
All these years, he’s had no idea how much truth there was to his joking about me being a thief who stole his heart.
“I moved your name to the top of the transplant list, and I deposited a sizable amount of money in the accounts of anyone who would notice the change in the list.”
“You said …” He shakes his head. “You said the recipient died before the heart arrived. You said I was the closest match, and if I didn’t take it, the donor heart would be lost. You said it was a miracle.”
Oscar told me to “save the boy.” He said that between right and wrong, life and death, there existed a gray area called love. In his completely fucked-up book of life principles, he insisted that love was boundless, fairness was a flaw of the weak, and morals killed more people than they saved.
Until five months ago when I left London, I was a product of Oscar Stone, equal parts nature and nurture—a third-generation thief destined to get caught. We all do, eventually.
“I lied.”
“You lied? You LIED!?!”
“I’m sorry. For that, I am truly sorry.”
“So … so …” He laces his fingers behind his neck and turns his gaze to the ceiling. “You’re sorry for lying to me or you’re sorry for stealing a heart that should not have been mine?”
“Both.”
He laughs the most cynical laugh. “So looking back, almost eight years later, you wish you wouldn’t have stolen the heart?”
I shake my head. “I wish I wouldn’t have taken a life.”
“Semantics.”
“No. I had no issue with stealing the heart. I’d do it again.
If there were some bank of hearts available to the highest bidder, I’d lie and steal from almost anyone to give you life.
Even now.” I need him to understand that my love for him has not vanished.
It never will. “But that heart didn’t belong to the highest bidder.
It belonged to another human, just like you, desperate to live.
So I didn’t just steal your heart. I stole a life.
That I would take back. That I would undo if I could. Even if …”
“Even if it meant I didn’t live.”
I blink, releasing my tears as I return a slow nod.
His jaw clenches several times as his glassy eyes meet mine. Before me stands a man who feels guilty for being alive. I never wanted for him to feel this way, but my guilt nearly killed me. I honestly believe it played a leading role in my body succumbing to cancer.
“I still love you,” he whispers.
Biting my trembling lips together, I nod, wanting nothing more than to fall into his arms and sob.
Of course he still loves me. I would never have said ‘yes’ to any man who didn’t love me so completely.
As much as the old me wants this to be an epic moment about a woman who fell in love with two men, but ultimately chose the one she loved longer, it’s not.
I step closer to him and press my hand to his chest again.
“I love you always, Daniel. But no matter what my prognosis is, the Scarlet you proposed to? She died. I’m not her.
I’m not going back to London with you—to that life—to Oscar.
Over the past five months, I found this person I never knew existed, and I like her and so does my body.
She’s the Scarlet who is beating cancer.
She lives in the moment. She doesn’t own a single electronic device.
She sees life so differently. She doesn’t live with regret. ”
My hand moves from his heart to his handsome face, wiping away his tears. “She … loves another man.”
Daniel collapses to the floor, hugging my waist. We’ve come full circle. I run my hands through his hair as he buries his face into my shirt and cries.
“Fuck you, Scarlet Stone. Fuck you for taking my heart. Fuck you for … for …” he sobs.
“Fuck me for living,” I whisper as I fall to my knees and hug him.
Right now, in the middle of the worst kind of pain, I realize I’m not choosing Theo.
He may not love me. We may forever be nothing.
I can live with that. I will live with that.
I’m choosing to let go of the guilt and hold on to the sound of my own breath—breathing in, breathing out.
I count them. Today, I choose Scarlet Stone.