Page 111 of A Fool's Game

At least, not entirely.

“What else?”

His voice shakes me out of my thoughts. “Excuse me?”

He looks at me with something in his eyes that I can’t decipher. “What else do you want to say? It sounds like there are a few things you’ve been holding back over the years.”

My mouth drops open, and I clamp it shut, determined to not show him how much his words affect me. HowI know he’s taunting me. How I know he doesn’t care what I have to say. I sharpen my weapons. “Gemma wanted to be my friend when we were kids and lived at our house. She told me all the staff kids thought I was lonely and wanted to ask me to play but they knew they weren’t allowed. Why is that? Why wouldn’t you let me play with them?”

His eyes narrow and the slight clench of his chin gives away his surprise. “I don’t know anything about that. There were never any rules about you playing with the staff children.”

“Was I lonely?”

He cocks his head to the side. “I don’t know, Ains. Were you?”

My gaze drifts out the bay window across the living room where the rain has taken up a fevered pitch. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember any of it.”

“What do you remember?”

I gape at him, unable to keep it together anymore. “From the estate?”

“The estate. Your childhood. Do you remember anything from the apartment?”

Where we lived when my mother was alive. Where she wasted away in bed.

The thought strikes me through the heart. I nearly gasp, but luckily hold it in. I shake my head instead. “I remember her reading. I remember walking up the stairs holding her hand. I remember how she used to smile.”

“Do you remember anything about me?”

It seems like a dangerous question to ask such a well-trained opponent. But, if pain is what he’s searching for, I don’t disappoint him. “I remember you telling me she wasn’t smiling anymore because she was gone even though I could see her smiling.”

I watch my direct hit do nothing to his perfect mask. I try again.

“I remember you sending me to the estate to live with Grandma and Grandpa, and when you finally came you didn’t bring her books. I remember you telling me they were gone. I remember thinking that meant they were dead, because she was dead, and you called her gone.”

The rain prevents silence from falling this time, but the air still feels heavy around me. I can’t bring myself to utter another word, so I just sit there. When my father finally speaks, it makes me wish I’d filled the space with mindless chatter, jokes, insults. Anything to avoid having to watch him tell the story I never thought I’d hear.

“Those weeks we watched your mother die in the apartment,” he starts, the words trapping my breath in my lungs and making every cell in my body scream at me to run, “was the end of a very long journey through cancer for her.”

I’m too astounded to speak right away. How had it never occurred to me that she might’ve been sick longer? That her dying wasn’t the only cancer story?

“When…” I can’t get the question out, but he understands.

“She was diagnosed when she was pregnant with you. Highly developed metastatic breast cancer.”

“But how does that work? Don’t you have to get chemo for cancer? Can you get chemo when you’re pregnant?” I’m overcome with the desire to pull out my phone and start searching for answers. Instead, I sit there stupidly while the man who’s taken care of me my whole life slowly, gently, dismantles everything I’ve ever known.

“You cannot get chemo when you’re pregnant, no. You can get certain types of localized radiation that have been deemed safe.”

“How pregnant was she?”

“Three months when we got the diagnosis.”

Air rushes out of my lungs like a hurricane. “But…so she had to wait until after I was born. Seven more months?”

“Around that long, yes.”

“What did that do to her chances of survival?”

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