Page 114 of The Love Rematch
Kaboom.
CHAPTERTWENTY-NINE
emily
The color drainsfrom Jake’s face. His tan cheeks turn ashen and pale before Emily’s eyes. He freezes, turning his gaze inward. The cogs in his brain spin visibly on overdrive as the past seven years and that fateful night play over and over in his mind. The wheels come off the track. But while he shuts down, Emily comes alive.
The words tumble out, one after another, like a flood unleashed. She’s lost the will to care about the damage left behind.
Because it feels so good.
After seven years of running, seven years of hiding, seven years of worrying it might get out, she’s finally free. The truth is staring them both in the face, and all Emily wants to do is meet it head-on.
“The morning after Dr. Copeland called to tell me I wasn’t pregnant, I went back to her office for some follow-up tests. It was like any other visit to the gynecologist. She felt around, drew some blood. I didn’t think much of it, until she called the next day to order a CT scan. By that point, I’d realized you left. You weren’t answering your phone. You weren’t responding to texts. Your mom called me in a panic wondering where you were. My dad offered to put a search out on your truck, but I knew where you’d gone. To LA. To film school. I knew it in my bones, same as I knew that Dr. Copeland ordering a CT was bad. I told Sam. She made me tell my parents. The four of us went to the hospital together. But I was alone when Dr. Copeland called to explain that the scan revealed evidence of a germ cell tumor in my left ovary. She said I was lucky. That they found it early. That these things often don’t get caught until they reach more advanced stages. If not for the pregnancy tests picking up the increased level of HCG in my blood, it could have been another year or more before they found it. She offered to put us in touch with some specialists in Atlanta, but I needed to get out of Georgia. I wanted to go to New York. I wanted to get away from…you.”
Emily pauses to swallow, overwhelmed by the rush of memories. They come in fragments. The stark white spot on the scan. The sound of Dr. Copeland’s unnaturally calm voice. The terror rising in her chest. The tears. The screams. Eighteen days passed between Jake leaving in the middle of the night and Emily leaving in the bright light of day, but she remembers them only in flashes, time fluid, her sense of self lost. It was as if she floated in a void untethered from the world. If not for Sam, she might have drifted away entirely.
“My dad had to stay and work,” she continues, “but my mom figured out coverage at the flower shop. She took Sam and me to New York. We convinced Sam to start school, but in between classes she came to every appointment she could. I postponed my acceptance to FIT and met with Dr. Laghari instead. She recommended surgery and a round of chemo, so I did both. My mom found me a small apartment to live in while I underwent treatment. She stayed while I recovered, letting her assistant run the shop. By December, I was in remission. A complete success, Dr. Laghari said. I’d have to be monitored for the rest of my life to make sure it didn’t come back, but the odds were in my favor. I was thrilled. We all were. It was the good news we needed to get through the holidays. We all went home to celebrate Christmas with my dad, and I was set to return to New York in the new year to finally start school, to get my life back on track. And then…I heard them.”
Emily closes her eyes.
Just like that, she’s eighteen again, back in her childhood home. She was on the way to the freezer for ice cream when she heard voices coming from the back porch. She didn’t mean to pry. She was about to leave, when—
“How are we going to tell the girls?”
She stepped closer.
She pressed her ear to the door.
“We’re not,” her father said firmly.
“We can’t exactly sell the house in secret,” her mother replied.
“So we tell them we’ve been wanting to downsize. We’re getting older and it’s too much upkeep. We’re going to get a small apartment in town.”
There was a pause.
“Will it be enough, you think?”
“To get through the next year, yes. And after that, we’ll find a way, Tina. After everything she’s been through, we can’t take FIT from her, too. And Sam is loving NYU. Do you hear her talk about that place? It’s where she needs to be. It’s where they both need to be. I’ll sell a kidney before I force either of them to come home.”
She backed away from the door with her heart in her throat. When she stepped into the living room, Sam was closing the front door with a scowl on her face. They made eye contact like two deer caught in the headlights. Emily didn’t know what to say. Sam clearly didn’t either. So they said nothing. They sank onto opposite ends of the couch without muttering a word because the second one of them broke, the other would have to do the same. AFriendsrerun played in the background.
“Weren’t you getting us ice cream?” Sam finally asked.
“Oh, right.”
It was an unspoken vow of silence.
Emily returned to the kitchen just as her parents came back inside. They froze, clearly wondering what she’d heard. She smiled warmly and feigned ignorance, but inside she broke all over again. Right then and there she knew what she had to do.
“Between the medical bills, the apartment in New York, and tuition for Sam,” she explains to Jake, blinking away the memory, “my parents had maxed out their savings. They couldn’t pay for FIT without selling the house, and even then, it wouldn’t have been enough. Sam would’ve dropped out of NYU if she heard. I know she would have, so I couldn’t tell her. And I couldn’t tell my parents. It would have destroyed them to know that I knew. But it was all my fault. So I did what I had to do. I went back to New York with Sam after break. And on what was supposed to be my first day of school, I sat in on a few of my classes, then walked to the admissions office and pulled my acceptance. I moved back to Georgia. I spent the spring working at the flower shop with my mom. I applied to a state school so I could live at home. And I tried to move on. From you. From New York. From cancer. From…everything. And I thought I had, I really did, until I woke up one morning to find my mother on national television airing me out to the whole world as the lonely shell of a person I’d become.”
“Em—” Jake croaks, unable to quite find his voice. “Why didn’t you— I mean, I would’ve—”
“I know.” She brushes her thumb over his cheek, hating the glassy sheen in his eyes. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. That’s why I didn’t tell anyone back home. I made my sister and my parents swear to keep it within the family, because I knew the second it got out, it would get back to you and you’d drop everything. I couldn’t live with that, Jake. I didn’t want you to be stuck with me in Georgia when it was clear you wanted to be all the way across the country, living your dream.”
“Em.” He shakes his head. Raw pain pulls at his skin, twisting his features and tightening them. “You’re the only thing I ever wanted, the only thing that mattered. And if I’d known— If I’d had any idea—”
