Free The Billionaire's Heart (The Silver Cross Club Book 4) by Bec Linder Page B

care-free twenty-something hipster, and the next day I felt thirty years older. I had more to worry about, now, than paying rent and getting a spot in my favorite spinning class.
    I read everything I could find, whenever I had a quiet moment at work, looking for anything, any hint of a miracle cure, any experimental treatment that might help. I learned the names of all of Ben’s nurses, and did my best to get on their good sides. And I worried. I tried to hide it from him, but I felt it sitting in my belly, a dark lump, a cold stone, slowly dragging me down to earth.
    I was afraid.
    A few days after he was admitted, I showed up at the hospital after work and found a strange woman sitting beside Ben’s bed. She turned when I came in the room and gave me a look of distaste I recognized all too well: Who’s this black girl?
    “Mom,” Ben said to the woman, “this is Sadie, my fiancée.”
    “Your what ?” his mother said, the pitch of her voice rising sharply, and I knew then that Ben hadn’t told her anything about me.
    He tried to explain, later, when we were alone. “They’re really racist,” he said, “my entire family, and I just didn’t want to deal with it. I didn’t want any trouble.”
    “Okay,” I said, still numb. Three years. We had been together for three years, engaged for one, and he never even mentioned me. They lived in New Jersey, and he’d never bothered to introduce us. And I, stupidly, had never questioned it, had assumed they were estranged, or lived too far away, or—well, whatever it was that I had thought.
    “I didn’t think you would care,” he said. “I guess I should have.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said, even though it did, it did matter, like a knife through my heart—that he had loved me, promised to spend the rest of his life with me, and never spoke one word to the people who raised him.
    He didn’t want the trouble ?
    If I’d found out six months earlier, we would have had a raging fight. He would have yelled, I would have thrown dishes, we would have slept in different rooms—and then we would have made up, and put it behind us. But I couldn’t throw a wine glass at his head, as sick as he was. There was no room for anger anymore. No outlet for it. Any capacity for rage had left me, drained away and replaced by sorrow. I needed it, that anger, to lance the wound and drain out the poison. It festered instead.
    I would have forgiven him, if he asked for my forgiveness, but he didn’t ask.
    His mother hated me. It was obvious from our first meeting, and it only got worse as the weeks went by. She refused to make eye contact with me, and responded in monosyllables to all of my attempts to make conversation. I quickly gave up on being friendly and tried to avoid her, but she never called ahead, just showed up at the hospital whenever she felt like it, and it was hard to make excuses to leave that didn’t sound like obvious excuses to leave.
    It sucked, but I could have handled it. So what if she hated me? I wasn’t going to cry about it. But what really chapped my ass was that she got herself listed as next of kin, and excluded me from every important decision about Ben’s care. It wasn’t so bad early on, when he was still able to make decisions for himself, but toward the end, when he was totally out of it, she was calling all of the shots.
    There was nothing I could do. We weren’t married. We had been waiting, saving up for a nice honeymoon in the Bahamas, and I came to regret that decision so hard I thought I would never be able to put it behind me. The medical decisions were the big thing, the major regret, but there was also little stuff, things I never would have thought about in my former life, the one I inhabited before Ben got sick. For instance: Ben had insurance, but it was a bare-bones, high-deductible plan, and mine had every bell and whistle. For instance: I used up all of my vacation days and sick leave, and after that I had to go back to work,