Chapter Forty-Three

THE CANCER WAS too advanced, he’d told her. He’d been to multiple specialists and there was nothing they could do. His last hope had been an appointment today with a doctor who had a reputation for being a miracle worker.

“So, what’s our miracle?” Joey asked between sobs.

“Our life together,” he said. “Joey, you and the kids have been my miracle.”

Joey was crying too hard for more questions and knew she wouldn’t get better answers tonight anyway. Dan was a fighter. If he was telling her this news like this, she knew it was over. Suddenly, her decision to come back, if she’d actually made it, felt like the only thing that made sense. Losing Dan was unthinkable. She couldn’t let herself think what it meant for her life right now.

She was here to walk beside him through this, and to be strong for their kids. And she would do exactly that.

“We should go away,” she said.

“We should what? Are you okay?” he said.

“I am the least okay I’ve ever been in my life. But if our time is running out, I’m not going to spend a single second of it crying.”

He gave her an incredulous look and they both laughed.

“Okay, I am obviously going to cry. A lot,” she said. “But I know what my life is without you, and I don’t want to spend any time thinking about that while you’re still here. And while you are still here, I want to go away. Just you, me, and the kids. Let’s spend our summer in London. People can visit us to say goodbye, but only if you want them to.”

“I think you’re in shock,” Dan said. “Let’s talk about this tomorrow, okay?”

She nodded and laid down next to him on the bed, then sighed as he wrapped himself around her. Was she in shock? Honestly, after the whole time-traveling experience and now Earth-shattering news, she quite likely was. But she was also thinking clearly and knew that if Dan was turning down treatment, it was because he wanted his last few months to be as happy as possible. They had planned to visit London on his fortieth birthday. Why not go now?

Somewhere in the back corners of her mind, her brain was trying to get her to grieve. To panic. Her husband had just told her he was dying. She should be a wreck right about now.

But in the same way she knew Dan would be stoic until the end, she knew she would be the one who brought the joy to their family. Those were the roles they had always played, and she could think of no better course of action than to keep the status quo. Whenever she wanted to panic, Dan had always been the one to balance her anxiety with a blanket of calm. And when things got tough, she found a way to walk her kids through it with humor and the simple thought that they could get through anything together.

There would be days ahead where she could fall apart. There would be years for that, in fact. She was going to be a widow before she turned forty. Other than losing her kids, losing Dan had always been her worst nightmare. But now she was facing it, she felt an almost eerie sense of calm. Losing Dan to cancer felt somehow easier to bear than him leaving her by choice.

That was clearly the denial talking, but she wore it like a shield.

She smiled as she felt Dan’s breathing become rhythmic and knew he was asleep. He’d always been able to do that, and she was always so envious, but not tonight. Tonight, she had plans to make.

She gently tried to sneak away, but somewhere in his sleepy state, Dan held her more tightly as she inched her way to the edge of the bed. And since her nights of sleeping in his arms were numbered, she gave up and instead decided to try to memorize everything about this feeling.

Dan’s arms were strong. She reached her hand up to touch the one he had wrapped around her and realized it wasn’t as big as she remembered. Come to think of it, Dan’s whole body didn’t feel like it had before. She had thought he was losing a little weight, but as they hadn’t touched in months, she hadn’t pieced it all together until just now.

As much as she had blamed him for their issues of late, could she really pin it all on him when she had somehow missed that he had cancer? How oblivious do you have to be to miss those signs?

Had it been the same way with Taylor? Taylor told her over and over again they were so young and she wasn’t ready for a big commitment. And what had Joey done? Proposed. Yikes. She’d been given a second chance to go back and do things better and apparently hadn’t learned a thing.

And poor Dan. In one timeline, he got dumped by both Joey and Betty, and in another, he ended up dying of cancer. Well, he would have died in that other one, too, she guessed. If it had been real. It certainly felt real. What even is reality anymore?

Either way, Joey remembered what she had said to him at the apartment in the alternate timeline. If she could have another chance, she’d spend the rest of her life making it up to him. Even though it would now just be the rest of his life, she wanted to do everything she could to live up to that promise, even if he’d never heard her make it.

Somewhere between deciding she was a terrible, oblivious partner, and trying to think through the space-time continuum, Joey finally fell asleep.