1 The day the doctors told me I wouldn’t live past twenty-five, the girl who had spent our entire childhood trying to outrun me stopped keeping score. Kendall Wright—who used to challenge me for top honors in every advanced class, who argued over the rules of every board game we ever played, whom I used to tease until she shoved my shoulder—suddenly softened into someone entirely unrecognizable. When I playfully called her a tyrant, her lower lip trembled, and her eyes welled with tears. She spent the next three years curating the world for me. She dragged me out to the coast at four in the morning to watch the sunrise. She bought expensive lanterns and released them into the summer night sky, their amber glow reflecting in her damp eyes as she announced to our entire circle of friends: “I don’t care how much time he has left. Jesse Albright is the only man I’m ever going to marry.” Then came our twenty-second year, and with it, Darren Cole. Darren was everything I was losing the ability to be: sun-drenched, broad-shouldered, radiating an effortless, incandescent vitality. Kendall went on roller coasters with him. She sat across from him in greasy twenty-four-hour diners at two in the morning, eating spicy noodles and laughing until her ribs ached. She rode bikes with him through torrential summer downpours, soaking her clothes, shrieking into the storm. She lived an entire, vibrant youth with him—the kind of youth my deteriorating body could never offer her. When I finally caught them, Kendall fell to her knees at the foot of our bed, her forehead pressed against my shins, weeping as she begged for a three-month grace period before transferring him away. “It’s only three months with him, Jesse,” she sobbed, clutching the fabric of my trousers. “I only want three months to get him settled. But I have three whole years left with you.” On the night of my twenty-second birthday, the bakery box sat unopened on the kitchen counter. The candle remained unlit. Kendall never came home. I stood by the second-floor bay window of our Chicago brownstone, watching the street below. Under the halo of an amber streetlamp, she and Darren stood in the steady drizzle. They embraced, pulled apart, lingered, and embraced again—an agonizing choreography of reluctance. Finally, Kendall grabbed the lapels of his denim jacket and pulled him down into a kiss so desperate, so drenched in rain and longing, that it looked as though parting would tear the skin from their bones. The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed midnight. The three-month promise had officially expired. Standing in the dark, watching the water pool on the glass, I finally let go. I stopped waiting for Kendall to become the girl who once cried at the thought of losing me. I turned away from the window just as the heavy oak front door clicked open. Kendall slipped inside, stepping out of her wet leather boots. The faint, unmistakable scent of cedarwood cologne drifted into the entryway. Darren’s signature scent. Seeing me standing silently in the shadows, she startled. “Jesse? Why are the lights off?” I said nothing. She quickly pulled off her damp scarf, her voice rushed, preemptively defensive. “Darren’s landlord came home drunk tonight and started pounding on his apartment door. The kid was terrified. He called me in a panic, and I had to go over to handle the building manager and make sure he was safe.” The hall sconce cast a sharp, sterile glare across my hollowed-out face. I offered a faint, bloodless smile. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me anymore, Kendall.” She froze, completely caught off guard. In the past, whenever Darren’s name entered a room, I didn’t even need to speak; the raw, bristling agony radiating off me was enough to set her on edge, provoking frantic arguments and guilty tears. Now, I was as flat and still as frozen water. I simply didn’t possess the physical or emotional stamina to create a ripple. My quiet detachment unsettled her. She crossed the hardwood floor, raising a tentative hand to stroke my hair. “If I don’t explain, you’ll just lock yourself away and suffer in silence. You’re the person I’m building my life with, Jesse. Your feelings matter to me. How could I not explain?” I instinctively tilted my head away. Her hand remained suspended in the empty air between us, fingers curling slowly into an awkward fist. “Darren is completely alone in this city,” she whispered, her voice dropping into that pleading, placating cadence she always used when she knew she was in the wrong. “He has no family here, no safety net. Anyone in his position would panic. His transfer paperwork is almost finalized, Jesse. But he doesn’t know anyone else, and I have to make sure the lease dispute is settled before he leaves. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I just abandoned him.” She peered into my eyes, searching for a trace of the old jealousy. “Just give me a few more days. Please?” I stared at the residual panic flickering in the depths of her hazel eyes. “Okay.” The tension in her shoulders visibly uncoiled. She reached into her wool coat and pulled out a small, navy velvet box. “Happy twenty-second birthday, Jess. I had this custom-made through an independent jeweler months ago.” She unclasped the leather strap and fastened it around my wrist. “It looks beautiful on you.” She didn’t notice—or perhaps she had simply forgotten—that the tiny star-shaped engraving near the dial was an exact replica of the vintage watch Darren had proudly featured on his social media feed three weeks ago. When Kendall turned toward the master bathroom to run a bath, I raised my arm, unbuckled the watch, and laid it on the console table. Then, slowly, I slid off the platinum band from my left ring finger. She had flown to Florence the summer we turned eighteen to commission that ring. She had pressed it into my palm behind a sunlit cathedral and told me, Jesse Albright, you are the only husband I will ever want in this life. At four in the morning, a muffled voice memo drifted through the thin bathroom door from her phone. Darren’s voice, thick with tears: “…I had a nightmare that he was banging on my door again. I’m so scared…” Without a second of hesitation, Kendall swung out of bed, stepped onto the balcony, and leaned against the railing. Her voice drifted through the drafty glass, impossibly tender: “Don’t be scared, Darren. I’m right here. It was just a bad dream…” I lay flat on my back in the dark, the deep, gnawing ache in my marrow radiating through my ribs, making it impossible to breathe, let alone sleep. That gentle, rhythmic tone had once belonged exclusively to me. It was the voice she used to coax bitter pills down my throat, the voice she used to wipe away my tears during my worst flare-ups, the voice that promised the sun would rise tomorrow no matter how dark the night felt. Now, every syllable she poured into another boy’s ear felt like a clean, calculated incision into a heart that was already disintegrating. When daylight broke, I began clearing the bedroom. I took the framed photographs off the wall, one by one, wrapping them in tissue paper and tucking them into the bottom drawer of my desk. Among them was a faded snapshot from when we were fifteen. It was the first time she had ever reached across the grass to take my hand; in the photo, my face was burning crimson, my eyes glued to my sneakers. On the back, in her sharp, loopy handwriting, she had penned: The hand I took at fifteen is the hand I’ll hold until the day you die. Since Darren entered the picture, Kendall hadn’t reached for my hand once. At noon, right on schedule, Kendall rushed home from the office to cook lunch. It was a ritual she had maintained for years—no matter how demanding her schedule as a junior partner became, she insisted on feeding me herself. Today, she prepared braised beef with stewed tomatoes, my lifelong favorite. I chewed a mouthful. It tasted of nothing. Dust and salt. After setting down her fork, she popped two small white pills from my prescription organizer and pressed them into my open palm. “Time for your meds, Jess.” I swallowed them with lukewarm water. A sudden, metallic warmth surged up the back of my throat. I turned my head, coughing violently into my fist, dark crimson flecks spattering across my fingers and the white linen napkin. Before Kendall could react, her phone on the dining table buzzed with an incoming voice note. Darren’s voice spilled into the room, loud and clear: “Kendall, I’m going through the Q3 spreadsheet, and the numbers aren’t balancing at all…” Kendall’s gaze flicked to my blood-stained hand, then instantly shifted to her vibrating screen. Her brows drew together in a knot of sharp, overwhelming irritation. “Get some rest, Jesse,” she said, already reaching for her trench coat. “I have to run back to the office and sort this out.” She didn’t wait for my answer. The heavy front door slammed shut behind her. I sat alone on the cold leather sofa, staring at the empty wall until the afternoon light grayed out and vanished into dusk. Today was supposed to be my quarterly oncology follow-up. Kendall had forgotten. I hailed a cab to Northwestern Memorial by myself. In the sterile, fluorescent examination room, Dr. Mercer studied my latest CT scans, his breath hitching in a heavy, practiced sigh. “Jesse… the malignant cells have aggressively metastasized throughout your lymphatic system and bone tissue,” he said quietly, his eyes avoiding mine. “We’re looking at months, maybe weeks, if the internal bleeding continues. You need to get your affairs in order.” Walking out of the hospital pavilion into the biting December wind, I pulled out my phone and refreshed my feed. Darren had posted a photo carousel thirty minutes earlier. New apartment all settled! the caption read, complete with a celebratory emoji. Huge thanks to someone special for taking me out for an amazing steak dinner to celebrate~ In the photo, Kendall’s hands were captured in soft focus, meticulously slicing a cut of prime rib and sliding the plate toward the beaming young man across from her. Just then, my father’s name flashed across the screen. “Jesse, how did the scan go today?” my dad asked, his voice warm and eager. “It went fine, Dad.” “Kendall mentioned a few months back that she was planning that massive round-the-world trip for you two. She told me she was taking you to Iceland for the Northern Lights and booking a chalet in the Swiss Alps for your birthday. Are the flights and hotels all set? I want to make sure you’re properly bundled up.” Listening to the boundless hope in my father’s aging voice, the fragile dam inside my chest gave way completely. A choked, ragged sob tore through my throat. “Dad…” I gasped, tears instantly freezing against my cheeks. “Kendall… she loves someone else.” I hung up, standing motionless as Chicago’s first heavy December blizzard settled over my bare head and shoulders. Looking out at the blinding wall of white, an old memory unspooled. In years past, whenever the temperature dropped below freezing, Kendall would fuss over me like a mother hen—wrapping my wool scarf twice around my neck, tucking my thumbs into lined gloves, pulling a beanie over my ears, scolding me softly: You’ve always been fragile in the cold, Jess. If you catch a chill, your joints ache all night, and I can’t stand seeing you hurt. A snowflake caught on my eyelash. I blinked, and it melted into a tear, tracking a hot line down my jaw. A grotesque, absurd thought crept into my mind: Why did I have to find out? If I had remained blind, then right up until the moment my heart stopped, Kendall would have remained that fierce fifteen-year-old girl who held my hand in the grass. She would have remained the devoted partner who sat by my hospital bed for seventy-two straight hours, clutching my fingers, whispering that she couldn’t survive a world without me. I could have slipped into the dark cradling that beautiful lie. Instead, the illusion had cracked, leaving behind a stranger whose betrayal was laid bare in every careless glance. Over the next week, the disease accelerated with terrifying speed. My hair came out in thick clumps every time I ran a brush through it; the deep, unrelenting bone pain made sleep impossible. Kendall, assuming I was unconscious under heavy painkillers, spent every midnight on the balcony, her headset on, laughing softly into the phone as she played online games with Darren. That bright, lilting laugh was like shards of glass scraping against my bare nerves. On Thursday afternoon, Darren arrived at our front door under the pretext of delivering urgent contract files. He walked into our living room in his pristine white sneakers, doing a slow, theatrical turn around the space. “It’s so incredibly cozy in here,” he remarked, glancing around the room with wide, innocent eyes. “No wonder Kendall never wants to stay late at the office anymore. You have such a wonderful sanctuary, Jesse.” I ignored him entirely, keeping my eyes fixed on the book in my lap. Darren drifted toward the coffee table. With a theatrical “Oops!”, his elbow clipped my open weekly pill organizer. The acrylic box clattered to the floor, sending my remaining, highly specialized chemotherapy and pain capsules scattering across the rug. He gasped, dropping to his knees in an exaggerated panic, his heavy sneakers deliberately grinding three of the brittle capsules into fine white powder. “I am so, so sorry!” he stammered, his hands fluttering helplessly. “I’m such a klutz, I didn’t mean to—” Hearing the commotion, Kendall emerged from the home office down the hall, her brow furrowed. “What happened?” Darren instantly retreated behind her, shrinking like a wounded fawn. “I accidentally knocked over Jesse’s medication… Kendall, did I ruin everything? Are these impossible to replace?” Kendall glanced down at the crushed white residue on the floorboards. Her voice was flat, devoid of the panic that once defined her whenever my health was threatened. “It’s fine. It’s just medicine. We can always order more from the pharmacy.” Years ago, when a supply chain issue delayed a vital pain management drug, Kendall had driven through a blizzard across three different counties, pounding on pharmacy windows until she secured a bottle. I wondered if she even remembered that girl. Everything had shifted. That evening, the accumulated internal damage triggered an acute, massive hemorrhage. I collapsed onto the cold bathroom tile, my vision swimming in dark gray static, blood soaking through the front of my shirt. Using the final shred of strength in my fingers, I dialed 911, gasped out our address, and then, trembling uncontrollably, tapped Kendall’s contact. A pathetic, desperate part of me still craved the past. I wanted to hear her voice—the voice that used to wrap around me when the agony was too great, telling me, Don’t be afraid, Jess. I’m right here. I’ve got you. The line rang four times before clicking open. Darren’s bright, energetic laugh crackled through the receiver: “Kendall’s in the middle of trying to win me that giant plush bear at the arcade! Jesse, is there something I can pass along to her?” In the background, the cheerful, bouncing synthesizer music of an entertainment complex pulsed loudly. The phone slipped from my limp fingers. The world dissolved into black. When I opened my eyes, the sterile smell of antiseptic and the rhythmic beep of a cardiac monitor filled the room. Kendall was sitting in the vinyl armchair beside my bed. On the sleeve of her beige wool sweater, a faint, sticky smudge of pink cotton candy was still visible. Dazed, trapped in the muscle memory of ten years of illness, my hand instinctively drifted toward hers, seeking comfort. The moment my fingertips brushed her cuff, she jerked her arm away as if burned. “Why did you do that to Darren?” she hissed, her eyes blazing with cold fury. “Did you post that video online?” I lay pinned against the thin hospital mattress, a hollow, bitter laugh catching in my throat. How pathetic was I? Ten years of slow deterioration, and I still hadn’t learned that the woman sitting before me had long since ceased to be the person who guarded my life. Seeing my silence, Kendall thrust her phone inches from my face. “He’s completely alone in this city! I was already in the process of transferring him to our London branch! Why did you have to unleash this kind of cruelty on him?” On the screen was a viral clip. My father had marched into the lobby of Kendall’s corporate headquarters during lunch hour. Confronting Darren as he stepped out of the elevator, my father had slapped him across the face, his voice cracking with grief as he yelled: “You shameless piece of trash! Destroying an engaged man’s life while he lies dying!” The video had exploded across local social media. Darren was labeled a corporate climber and a homewrecker; thousands of vitriolic comments flooded his profiles. Kendall took a sharp, ragged breath, her voice shaking with righteous indignation. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Darren was standing on the ledge of his balcony this morning. He nearly jumped!” “I didn’t… film that,” I whispered, my voice barely carrying over the hum of the oxygen machine. “I didn’t post it…” Before I could finish, Kendall’s phone lit up with Darren’s name. She didn’t spare me another glance. She stood up, her face tight with disgust. “You need to think long and hard about who you’ve become, Jesse. Stop causing drama.” The door swung shut with a hard, final click. The online fallout metastasized into a firestorm. Internet sleuths quickly unearthed Darren’s employment records, exposing his rapid promotions under Kendall’s direct mentorship. Accusations of workplace misconduct and predatory behavior piled up by the hour. To shield him from the barrage—and to salvage his reputation at any cost—Kendall posted a public statement on her personal and professional channels that midnight. The attached image showed her and Darren standing shoulder-to-shoulder under the bright lights of Navy Pier, smiling radiantly. Darren Cole is my partner, she wrote. Please cease this targeted harassment immediately and leave an innocent man alone. The digital tide reversed instantly. I became the vindictive, manipulative ex-fiancé weaponizing my illness for sympathy; my father became an abusive, unhinged bully. Hundreds of direct messages flooded our accounts—death threats, graphic insults, and vile, doctored photos. Lying in my hospital bed, my trembling hands began compiling a rebuttal. I uploaded twenty years of archives: high school graduation photos, medical proxy documents, our joint lease agreements, the custom ring receipt from Florence. My thumb hovered over the Publish button. The door to the private room burst open. A dull thud echoed against the linoleum. Kendall—proud, untouchable, brilliant Kendall Wright—was on her knees before my hospital bed, her spine ramrod straight, her palms flat against the floor. “Jesse,” she pleaded, her eyes rimmed in red. “I am begging you. Delete the post. Don’t publish it.” I stared down at her, tears spilling silently over my cheekbones. “They are sending death threats to my father, Kendall! They are calling him a monster! What is wrong with you?” Kendall averted her eyes, unable to meet my gaze. “Darren just graduated college last year, Jesse… He doesn’t have your resilience. If you publish this, his career is over before it even starts. He will be blacklisted across the entire industry.” She crawled a few inches closer, reaching up to clutch the metal guardrail of my bed. “I am begging you. Trade our twenty years together for his life, just this once. Let him have this. Once the dust settles, I swear to God, I will spend the rest of my life making this up to you.” I looked down at her bowed head. I remembered our sophomore year of high school, when three older boys had cornered me behind the bleachers because of my weak lungs. Kendall had thrown herself into the fight, getting shoved into the muddy gravel, her knees bleeding through her jeans, refusing to back down until campus security arrived. Now, she was on her knees, weaponizing those twenty years of shared history to demand that I remain a silent, obedient punching bag for another man’s comfort. “Why?” The word scraped out of my chest, raw and ragged. “Why him?” “Because I can’t bear to see him broken,” she whispered. I can’t bear to see him broken. The phrase drove into my chest like an ice pick. She had shielded me for years, only to decide that I was the one who could be sacrificed without consequence. I glanced down at my phone screen. Someone had superimposed my father’s face onto a funeral headstone with the caption: Die faster, old freak. Without another word, I pressed Publish. “Jesse Albright!” Kendall surged to her feet, her face contorted in sheer, unadulterated fury. “Do you truly have to destroy his life to feel satisfied?! When did you become so utterly venomous?!” She turned on her heel, slamming the door so hard the glass pane rattled in its frame. The following morning, my father suffered a catastrophic hemorrhagic stroke brought on by acute hypertensive stress. He never regained consciousness. He died without ever seeing the public record corrected. He died without ever knowing that I had secretly finalized our travel itinerary—the dream trip he had talked about for twenty years, the one he sacrificed to pay for my treatments. He had wanted to see the mist rising over the mountain lakes, wanted to touch the snow of the far north, wanted to buy me a string of blessed prayer beads from an alpine monastery to pray for my recovery. I had booked every ticket. I never got the chance to tell him. Discharging myself from the hospital against medical advice, I forced my failing body through the motions of arranging his cremation and memorial service alone. It was the first time in my adult life that I had handled a crisis without Kendall. Before this, she dispensed every medication, prepped every meal, and even cupped her warm hand over my eyes each morning so the harsh sunlight wouldn’t trigger my migraines. How tragic that the first skill I learned in her absence was how to bury the only family I had left. On the night of the wake, sitting alone in the empty funeral home, I unlocked my phone. Darren had posted a new photo. He was standing beneath the snow-capped peak of Mount Rainier, Kendall beside him holding an umbrella over his head, her smile soft, protective, and serene. Thank you for pulling me out of the dark, the caption read. A moment later, an unknown number sent a short video file to my inbox. The footage was taken inside Kendall’s office weeks earlier. My father was sitting in the leather guest chair, his posture bent, his voice cracking with humiliation: “Kendall… Jesse only has a couple of years left. I am begging you as a father… just be good to him while he’s still here…” On the recording, Kendall was silent for a long, agonizing beat before answering in a cold, professional tone: “Mr. Albright, I have my own boundaries to protect.” Watching that cold silhouette on the screen, I let out a dry, wheezing laugh until tears blurred my sight. The same girl who had once knelt before my father, promising that Jesse was the only person who would ever hold her heart, was the very person who had pushed us both off the edge of the cliff. Back at the brownstone, I packed a single duffel bag and called a car for O’Hare International Airport. As I pulled up to the terminal, a text from Kendall popped onto the screen: Jesse, Darren fell into a severe depressive spiral because of the online mob. I had to get him out of the city to clear his head. As soon as we get back to Chicago, I will make everything right between us. I promise. I opened her contact card. With steady fingers, I blocked her cell, deleted her messages, purged her from my social channels, and erased every shared digital footprint. At the security gate, I stopped and looked through the floor-to-ceiling glass at the Chicago tarmac. The snow was falling with a quiet, suffocating violence, threatening to bury the entire city in white. For the time I had left, I was going to live for my father. And for myself.
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