Ryan, beloved husband & father.
Lily grabbed my hand so hard that it hurt.
Andrea looked down for a moment, then said softly, “Seven years ago, Ryan reached out to me out of nowhere. We’d been divorced for years, and he’d had full custody of the boys ever since I went through a difficult chapter in my life. So when he asked me to take them, I just stared at him. Then he showed me his medical records.” She stopped and looked at me with tears in her eyes. “Stage four cancer.”
I closed my eyes.
She asked us to go with her somewhere.
Advertisement
“He was terrified,” Andrea continued. “He didn’t want you raising three children alone after he was gone. He thought he was setting something right before time ran out. I told him that he was wrong… that he couldn’t just take them from you like that.”
“But he did it anyway,” I whispered, and Andrea closed her eyes as tears slipped down her cheeks.
The truth tore through me in layers. Ryan had been so sick and never told me. He had looked me in the face every day while making that plan. He had let me spend seven years grieving three people, while two of them were living whole lives somewhere else.
I stared at Andrea. “He didn’t give me a choice. He decided my whole life for me.”
She nodded. “I know.”
That did not help.
“He was terrified.”
Advertisement
I wrapped my arm around Lily when I heard her crying beside me, and she leaned into me, whispering that she missed her dad. I held her close for a long moment before Andrea quietly asked us to get back in the car.
***
Back at Andrea’s house, I asked to see Jack and Caleb. She said they were studying abroad in a boarding school. I sat down hard on the couch.
