Page 38 of Due North
I dropped my head back to the chair and shook it. “Guys, you don’t understand.”
“You’re right. We don’t,” Dawn said, leaning forward on the table. “We need you to explain it to us.”
Cece squeezed my knee again to ground me and offered that smile I needed to see at least twice a day just to keep breathing. She was gorgeous, and I was such a goner when it came to her. “Would you like me to explain it to them the way the doctor explained it to me? Would that help?”
My gaze locked with hers. Worry. Compassion. Empathy. There was something else there that I didn’t want to name because naming it felt like an excellent way to make it something it would never be.
“Thank you, but I need to do it. Right or wrong, I need to do it.”
“Right,” everyone said around the table.
“It’s never wrong to share your burdens with someone,” Amity said as she walked through the door and joined her husband at the table. “The babies are asleep, but I don’t expect Poppy to be for long. Not when she knows Ba is here.”
Everyone laughed at her name for me, and I blushed but joined them in their laughter. It felt good to laugh and not carry so much heaviness in my chest. I took another bite of the roll, the doctor’s orders about more food and less work ringing in my ears. I washed it down with coffee and prepared myself for battle. I wasn’t battling the people around this table. I was fighting the fear within myself to be honest with them even when it hurt.
“I don’t know where to start,” I admitted, toying with the fork on the plate.
“How about with what put you in the hospital?” Amity said, her tone even and nonjudgmental. “We’ve been worried about you for days, but the doctors wouldn’t tell us anything.”
“That’s fair,” I agreed, my head nodding. “I’m sorry about being secretive. I just don’t talk about this with anyone.”
“Because?”
“It’s what my mom died from,” I answered honestly.
Blaze waved his hand in the air for a moment. “Nash told us your mother died by suicide.”
“What?” I asked, my brow raised. “Nash told you that?”
Heaven took Blaze’s hand and nodded. “He came by after he heard what happened. He felt terrible about having put you in the cell instead of taking you to a hospital.”
“He didn’t know,” I said with a shrug. “Can’t do something to help when you don’t know what the problem is.”
“Exactly,” Ash agreed. “That’s what we’re saying, son. We can help you, but first, we need to know what the problem is.”
“Okay,” I said on a puff of air. “Okay. My mother died of suicide, yes, but her disease was the underlying cause of her depression. She suffered for years from myasthenia gravis.”
Dawn raised a brow. She had rheumatoid arthritis and was all too familiar with autoimmune diseases. “That’s a disease that causes our muscles to miscommunicate, right?”
I nodded and swallowed around the dryness in my throat. Cece kept her hand on my knee, which supported me when I needed it most. “Something like that,” I agreed. “In a nutshell, the communication between your nerves and muscles breaks down. You suffer weakness and fatigue, and if it’s not treated, you lose the ability to walk, smile, chew, and eventually breathe.”
“Which is where you were at when they took you to Duluth,” Blaze said pointedly.
“Yeah, admittedly, it got away from me this time.”
“This time?” Heaven asked.
I nodded, tipping my head to the side in a shrug. “When the fire happened, this disease was the reason I couldn’t save my brothers and sisters. I had the same disease my mother had and didn’t know it. I’d been falling a lot, and my legs were weak. I just thought I’d hurt myself on the ranch, and it would improve, but it just got worse. I didn’t do anything about it because I had five other kids to take care of and not enough hours in the day. My mom was never around to help, but now I understand that the disease altered her mental status and changed who she was.”
“Is that part of this myas—” Amity shook her head. “What you called it.”
“Myasthenia gravis,” I repeated. “Mental changes aren’t a symptom of the disease, but more a side effect?” Everyone nodded, and I kept my gaze pinned on the table. “She suffered from depression because of it and slowly went down a rabbit hole she couldn’t get out of, I guess.”
“You told Ash you were in remission, but then that ended?” Beau asked.
“I was diagnosed the first time when I went into the hospital with the burns on my legs. They treated me with surgery to remove the thymus, which had a growth. That’s relatively common with this disease. Since I was a teenager, remission was expected. By the time I left North Dakota three years later, I had no problems.”
“But that changed about six months ago,” Heaven said pointedly. “We all saw the change, too.”
