34. Mia
MIA
Ineeded to get out of the house.
The glass walls were beautiful when I arrived. Now they made me feel like something on display. Dale's check-ins three times a day. Dominic's team running sweeps from a rental in town. Tony watching me like I might vanish if he blinked. Safe. Watched. Suffocating.
Avery was out of her fish crackers. Not an emergency. Sophia would have picked them up on her next run without blinking. But I wanted air. I wanted ten minutes of driving with the windows down and nobody tracking my breathing.
Tony was in his studio. I told him I was running into town.
He set his brush down. "For what?"
"Crackers. Maybe coffee."
His jaw tightened. He didn't argue. He'd learned that arguing made me dig in harder. And I'd learned that the tightness in his jaw was him swallowing every reason I shouldn't go.
"Dale's on shift," I said. "I'll be twenty minutes."
He nodded. Once.
I drove into town with the windows cracked and the spring air pushing through the car. The mountains had started to soften. Snow still capped the peaks, but the lower ridges were greening up, shedding winter in patches.
Dale would be somewhere behind me. A truck at a turnout. A man with binoculars on the ridge. I never saw him. That was the point.
I parked on Main Street and grabbed a basket. Walked into the grocery store like a woman buying crackers for a five-year-old. Nothing more.
The store was warm and bright. Overripe bananas near the entrance, the hum of the refrigerator case. I grabbed a box of Avery's cereal on autopilot. The purple one. No green loops.
Heading toward the snack aisle for the fish crackers, I cut through the bread section.
And stopped.
Ava Fielding was standing in the middle of the aisle.
She wasn't shopping. She wasn't reaching for anything. She was just standing there, her hands at her sides, staring at the shelves like they'd asked her a question she couldn't answer.
Her face was wet.
Tears ran down her cheeks in steady, silent lines. No sound. No movement. Just a woman crying in front of the sourdough like the world had ended and she was the last one to find out.
My first instinct was to turn around. Ava and I weren't friends. We weren't anything.
Emma's stepsister. The dancer who'd traded New York ballet for a mountain town and never said why. She'd been cold to me since the coffeehouse in my first week. The sharp comments to the young barista. The way she stiffened every time Tony's name came up.
I understood it. She and Tony had a history. Brief, empty, and he'd ended it badly. That didn't matter when you were the one left behind.
Should have turned around.
Didn't.
My basket hit the linoleum. I walked toward her. She didn't look up. She didn't move. I stopped beside her and put my hand on her arm.
"Ava."
Nothing. Her skin was ice cold through her sleeve.
I didn't ask if she was okay. She wasn't okay. That much was obvious. I just stood beside her with my hand on her arm and waited.
She broke.
The sound that came out of her wasn't quiet. It was loud, raw, ugly. The kind of crying that came from somewhere deep and structural.
She turned into me and grabbed the front of my jacket with both fists and sobbed against my shoulder. Her whole body shook.
An older woman with a cart slowed at the end of the aisle. Stared. I shook my head once and she moved on.
I held Ava. Right there between the wheat bread and the rye. I held the woman who had looked at me with ice in her eyes for months and I let her fall apart.
"Cancer," she said against my jacket. The word was muffled and ragged. "Stage IV. It's spread to my kidney."
My arms tightened around her.
"The doctors told me last week." She was gasping between words. "I haven't told anyone. Not Emma. Not my parents."
Her fist went to her mouth. "I walked in here because I needed bread and I've been standing here for twenty minutes. I can't remember how to choose."
There was nothing to say about it being okay. I didn't know if it would be.
Telling her she was strong would have been worse. She already knew that.
So I said, "I'm here."
She cried harder. I held on.
We left the store together. My basket sat abandoned in the bread aisle. The crackers could wait.
Ava let me drive her home. Her apartment was above a gift shop on the far end of Main Street. Small and tidy. Ballet posters on the walls. Barre propped in the corner of the living room.
A pair of pointe shoes hung from a hook by the door, ribbons trailing.
She sat on the couch and pulled her knees to her chest. Smaller than I'd ever seen her.
Ava was already tiny. Now she was trying to disappear.
I made tea because it was the only useful thing I could think of. Found chamomile in a tin above the stove. Brought her a mug. Sat on the other end of the couch and waited.
She told me everything.
The symptoms started in the fall. Fatigue she blamed on the altitude. Pain in her side she blamed on an old dance injury.
By the time she went to the doctor in Telluride, it had spread. Stage IV. Ovarian, metastasized to the kidney.
The oncologist laid out treatment options in a tone Ava described as careful and practiced.
"He kept calling it 'the journey,'" she said. "Like I'd signed up for a hiking trip."
Chemo first. Then they'd reassess. The numbers weren't terrible. The spread was limited to one secondary site. There was a chance. A real one.
But a chance wasn't a guarantee. Ava was twenty-six. She'd already given up ballet, already moved to a mountain town to start over. She wasn't supposed to start over again.
I listened the way I'd learned to listen. Not with solutions. Not with fixes. With my whole body turned toward her. With silence where silence was needed and nothing where nothing was enough.
When she finished, the tea was cold and the light through her windows had shifted from afternoon to early evening.
"You don't have to do this alone," I said.
Ava stared at me. Her eyes were swollen, her nose red, her face blotched and raw. She'd never been less like the icy, perfect woman from the coffeehouse.
She'd never been more human.
"Why are you being nice to me?" she said. "I've been terrible to you."
I shrugged. "So?"
She almost laughed. A wet, broken sound. Half a sob, half something new. The beginning of whatever was happening between us.
"Emma doesn't know," she said.
"You should tell her."
"I know."
"She'll want to be there."
"I know that too." Ava dropped her forehead to her knees. "I just can't figure out how to say the words out loud to someone who loves me. It was easier to say them to you."
That landed somewhere in my chest. She was right. Sometimes it was easier to break in front of a stranger than in front of the people who would break with you.
"Whenever you're ready," I said. "But don't wait too long. She'll want to help."
Ava lifted her head and studied me with those dark, piercing eyes. Something in her expression shifted.
The hostility was gone. Not replaced by warmth. Not yet. But the wall she'd built between us had a crack in it.
"Thank you," she said. Quiet. Like she meant it in a way she hadn't meant anything in a long time.
I squeezed her hand. "I'll check on you tomorrow."
She nodded. I stood up. At the door, she called my name.
"Mia."
I turned.
"I'm sorry," she said. "For how I've been."
"Don't," I said. "You had your reasons."
She almost smiled. Didn't quite make it. But close.
Down the stairs. Into the car. I sat there for a full minute before I could turn the key.
My hands were shaking. My chest was tight. I'd been holding myself together for Ava because that was what she needed. Someone steady. Someone who wouldn't crumble.
Because I'd been there before. Not cancer. Something else. A different kind of diagnosis.
You'll never see him again. He's gone. And the man who did it is still out there.
That tilt. When the world shifts and everything you thought was solid turns out to be temporary. I knew it in my bones.
The drive home was quiet.
Tony's studio was wrecked.
Through the glass, I could see it before I even opened the door. Canvases turned to the walls. Drop cloths bunched in heaps. Paint smeared across the worktable in angry streaks.
He'd been in here all day. Working through something the only way he knew how.
I opened the door. The smell hit me first. Linseed oil and turpentine. Familiar now. His world.
His head came up from the canvas on the easel. Forearms covered in paint. Hair pushed back from his face. He'd been at this for hours.
He saw my face. He didn't ask what happened. He set his brush in the jar of thinner and waited.
I crossed the studio. Stepped over a wadded rag. Around an open tube of cadmium red. Walked straight to him and pressed my hands flat against his chest.
His heart beat steady under my palms.
He covered my hands with his. Paint on his fingers, warm against my skin. He didn't say a word. He just stood there with my hands under his and waited for me to tell him or not tell him.
I tilted my face up toward his. He was so much taller than me. I had to crane my neck to find his eyes. He searched my face. His hand found my waist, fingers spanning so wide they nearly met at my spine.
He lowered his mouth to mine. Slow. Careful.
His lips carried the taste of coffee. His paint-stained fingers stayed over my hands on his chest.
I slid my hands up over his collarbone, around the back of his neck, and into his hair. Dried paint stiffened some strands. The rest felt soft.
He made a low sound. His hand tightened at my waist. Paint smeared warm through my shirt. Each finger pressed in clear.
The kiss deepened.
His free hand moved to my jaw and tilted my face. I rose onto my toes. He bent lower and kept his mouth on mine.
My back hit the edge of the worktable. Paint jars rattled. His hands found the hem of my shirt and paused.
"Yeah?" he asked. His voice sounded rough.
"Yeah."
He pulled the shirt over my head and dropped it. Studio air touched my skin.