Aidan didn’t think he could feel any worse than he already did, but he was wrong. “I fucked up. I didn’t know...” He ran his hand over his face. There was no point in going into the details. “But I should have. I should have trusted her.”
“Yeah,” Andrew agreed. “Guess you millionaire-types put more faith in your bank statements than in the love of a good woman, huh?” The words were sharp, but his tone was resigned. “Is that why you didn’t tell her who you really were? You were afraid she’d care more for your assets than you?”
Aidan gave him a rueful smile. “It’s been known to happen.”
Andrew snorted. “Wouldn’t know about that, would I? The most important thing, though, is that you realize Mary’s not like that.”
“Yeah, I get that. So. Are you going to tell me where she is?”
Andrew’s eyes met his for several long seconds, and Aidan knew he was deciding whether or not to tell him. Finally, Andrew blinked and exhaled. “She’s in the hospital over in Pine Ridge.”
Aidan abruptly straightened in his seat. “Hospital? Why is she in the hospital?”
Another long pause. “A few weeks ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer. They did the surgery today.”
Chapter Thirteen
Mary decided she definitely liked being the one providing care a lot better than the one receiving it as she lay there in her semi-private room, fighting another wave of nausea. The last thing she needed was another round of the dry heaves; the contents of her stomach had been fully purged hours ago. Her throat felt raw from the tube they’d inserted while she was under anesthesia, and it felt like someone had taken a cleaver to her chest.
She checked again, reaffirming that they hadn’t completely removed her breasts and uttered a sigh of relief. Vanity wasn’t exactly her thing, but if she had a choice between keeping her parts or not, she preferred to keep them.
Operable masses, they’d called them. Not one, but several. In both breasts. Probably benign. Lucky her.
As it turned out, the callback for a repeat mammogram hadn’t been because of blurry images or a poor angle. It had been to confirm the results of the first one. When that showed the same results, she was scheduled for a higher-resolution test. Then ultrasounds. Then needle biopsies. More people had touched her breasts in the last few weeks than in the rest of her thirty-one years combined.
Everyone said she was handling it so well. Maybe she was. When Cam was sick, she’d come in contact with a lot of people who’d been diagnosed with cancer, male and female, rich and poor, young and old. Their reactions were as varied and different as the people themselves. Some cried. Some went right into fighting mode. Others, like her, took the news with calm stoicism, displaying neither hysterics nor histrionics.
She’d seen enough of the disease to be intimately familiar with it and what it would mean. Not just with Cam, either. Ever since she began fully developing in her mid-teens she’d been cursed with exceptionally dense tissue and a predilection for cysts. A particularly outspoken mammo tech once told her point-blank that she was just naturally “lumpy”.
It was no excuse. Ignorance was not bliss, not when it landed her here, like this.
But it did explain why she wasn’t as diligent with her self-breast exams as she should have been. Each month she’d invariably find one or more masses, and each time she would worry herself sick until her next cycle came and they shrank or moved, and then new ones appeared.
After the first couple of scares that turned out to be nothing, the docs told her to “just keep an eye on things” and call if one got bigger or lasted more than three months. There was a point in her life when she was sure one of them would turn out to be something more than hormonal in nature.
Cam had been her rock then, listening to her calmly and patiently whenever she got herself worked up. No matter what happened, he’d said, he would always be there for her. How ironic was it that Cam was the one diagnosed with the cancer before he even turned twenty one?
They’d been so na?ve. Thinking that if they did everything right, listened to all of the so-called experts and battled through the treatments - which were sometimes more horrific than the disease itself - that everything would be alright.
What a crock of shit. She wondered what Cam would have to say about all that now.
It didn’t matter, not really. Mary had already made up her mind. She’d agreed to the surgery, but that was it. There would be no chemo, no radiation, no anything other than a follow-up mammogram in a few months. She would not go through what Cam did. If this didn’t work, she’d already decided she’d rather the disease take her quickly.