I looked up then and our eyes met. It was powerful, like a physical blow. My chest felt tight and it was difficult to breathe. I reached out and clamped my hand around her delicate wrist. “Thank you.”
She didn’t smile. “Don’t thank me yet.”
I held my breath.
“I want to keep the pregnancy.”
I swallowed a golf-ball-sized lump in my throat. “So that’s the end of the discussion?”
She shook her head. “No. It’s the beginning. You tell me what you want.”
I blinked. “I want you. I want you healthy. I want you to have the best chance of surviving you possibly can. Eighty-five percent isn’t the greatest number, but at least it’s better than—”
She pulled her hand away from my hold. “No, don’t do that. Don’t talk numbers and percentages. Tell me what you are feeling. Tell me what you want.”
I clenched my teeth in frustration. “I can’t not talk about the numbers, Mia, okay? Everything in my life is about numbers and percentages. Everything. It’s my job. It’s the way my brain works.”
She took a breath and looked away as a light breeze caught some strands of her long, white hair, sending it dancing around her shoulders. “We’re talking about an embryo. A new life—a little you and me. In eight months it will be a baby—our baby. How does that make you feel?”
The only feeling I had inside was icy numbness, certain dread. “I don’t feel anything but cold fear, to be honest. I can’t lose you.”
Her dark brows bunched together. “If we end this, I may never be able to bear another child. You may never be a father.”
I shook my head and looked away. “For one thing, that is not the most important thing to me right now—”
“It will be, someday.”
“Maybe. But I know what I want now. I need you to be healthy again. I need for you to do everything you can to fight this.”
Emilia blinked. “Okay, and what was the other thing?”
“The other thing is that there is more than one way to become a parent. If and when that becomes important to me, there will be other ways.”
“For you maybe, but not for me. Chemo has a big chance of putting my body into permanent, early menopause.”
I shifted my seat on the hard bench. “I spent the entire day yesterday researching this. You can’t do an egg retrieval because of the hormones involved and the timing but you can have part of your ovarian tissue frozen—”
She wasn’t looking at me. Her face was blank, like she had zoned out.
“Mia—” I said, shaking her hand. She looked up at me—looked through me.
“You aren’t telling me anything I can’t find out myself from Google or my doctor. You aren’t telling me what only you can tell me.”
“I can’t tell you what you want to hear. That I’m happy you are pregnant. I’m not.”
She exhaled slowly, clearly frustrated. “I don’t want you to tell me what I want to hear. I want to hear about what you feel. What do you feel?”
I paused, looked away, studied the long morning shadows we were casting on the trail behind us. I cleared my throat past the sudden tightness. “I’m afraid.”
She gave a curt nod. “And?”
“That’s all there is. Fear. I love you and I need for you to survive this. I need you to have the best chance of doing that.”
“And…what about the baby?”
“It’s not a baby.”
“In eight months—”
“In eight months, if I have anything to say about this, you will be finished with your chemotherapy and be declared cancer-free and I will finally be able to breathe again.”
She frowned. “I’ve never had much family. It’s always just been me and my mom. I wanted brothers and sisters growing up, or even cousins and aunts and uncles. I had my grandma and we saw her once in a while but—I always wanted a family. Thought that after I became a doctor, maybe I’d have a child…”
“You and I can be a family. We have each other.”
Her hand came up to rub her forehead. “Someday you’ll need more.”
“This isn’t someday, this is now.”
She looked up at me with exasperation in her eyes. “Someday I’ll need more. And this is my only chance.”
“We’re young. We shouldn’t have to face this shit now, but we are. Life isn’t fair.”
“Adam…” she said in a low voice, trembling on the second syllable of my name. I waited while she collected herself, cleared her throat. “There is still a chance I won’t make it. If I don’t, you’d still have the baby—our child.”