Still, his worry for her couldn’t be erased. Whatever had happened to make her backslide like this had to be horrible, and a part of him wanted to call Andy to find out. Surely her brother would know.
But he’d done that before, and going to her family with his concerns wasn’t the answer. If she wasn’t willing to lean on him in hard times, it was time to face the brutal reality and move on. He was going to return to Denver. Tonight.
It was time to stop holding onto something that would never be.
He turned off the lights on the bridge as he made his way back to the house for the last time.
Chapter 35
When Natalie finally pulled herself off the bathroom floor, her head was groggy from crying and her hands burned from the tile powder. Touchdown stirred on the floor outside the shower. He’d come to sit beside her like the loyal dog he was as she surrendered to another batch of horrible, gut wrenching sobs, deep in her belly. She hadn’t been able to stop the guttural sounds that had tore from her throat. Touchdown hadn’t left her side once, but she’d made him stay outside the shower because she didn’t want him to get tile powder on his paws.
She straightened like an old woman who’d sat too long, her bones popping in protest, and looked in the mirror.
There she was again. That crazy woman, maddened by grief, reduced to insanity by the threat of that damn thing called cancer.
Her hair was streaked with powder and in wild disarray like she was the bride of Frankenstein. She brushed the white powder off her shirt, and that’s when the full pain of her hands hit her. The blood had coagulated, but they were a fiery red, and they hurt like a million bees had stung them.
Turning on the faucet, she let the water run over them, wincing in the beginning as her hands burned. Everything throbbed. Her knees ached. Her back was tight. Her head was pounding.
She’d succumbed to the cold, to the dark, once more. Looking at herself, she saw the puffy, mascara streaked eyes. The tightness around her mouth from sobbing.
Her eyes gleamed under the lights in the bathroom. Love me, she heard a soft voice say, one that had warmth, one that was totally different from the whispers of the cold phantom. I need you to love me. Even when I’m like this. It took her a moment to realize the voice was her own.
The faucet continued to run as she braced her hands on the countertop. Tears started to fall as she watched herself start crying again. How was she supposed to love herself like this? How was she supposed to find anything beautiful about this mad woman? How was she supposed to be willing to feel this pain, this agony? Ever since childhood, she’d tried to be strong, to keep a stiff upper lip, to never show weakness. She’d been proud of that.
Then she thought of how she’d found her mother earlier. The woman she admired had been suffering alone with this horrible secret. Would their mother ever have told them if the biopsy turned out to be negative? She doubted it, and while she understood her mother’s reasons, she didn’t want to be like that.
Her hand lifted to the wild locks of her hair, sticking out like the snakes of Medusa. She gently stroked her hair back from her face. Looked at herself in the mirror again.
Love me, she heard that whisper say again in her mind. Comfort me. I’m hurting.
She didn’t want to hurt, but it didn’t seem like she could escape it as she looked at herself in the mirror. After Kim’s death, she’d stacked brick upon brick around herself to wall off the pain, to keep the cold wasteland away. Many of those bricks had been toppled these last few weeks, toppled from the sheer force of Blake’s love for her.
What had he said? When you looked at Kim at the end, when she weighed less than a hundred pounds, did you love her any less?
The Kim she’d loved, the woman who’d been her best friend since college, hadn’t been recognizable in those final weeks of her life. But Natalie had loved her. If Kim had even once called herself ugly and unlovable, she would have told her that it was bullshit. That she loved her. That she found her beautiful.
Why couldn’t she give herself that same fierce love?
She brushed a tear as it trailed down her face. This woman, this crazy, hurting woman was her too—just like the ravaged body on the hospice bed had still been Kim.
This hurting woman deserved to be loved, not shunned. Not abandoned. She wasn’t sure how she was going to do it, but she had to start somehow.
“I…love you,” she whispered to the crazy woman in the mirror.
The pain that radiated from her heart was like a supersonic wave, and she started crying harder. But she didn’t look away from the woman in the mirror with the wild eyes and hair.
“I love you,” she whispered again as the tears streamed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”