I’d been pacing, but now I had to sit. I had to sit or my knees were going to give out.

A 50 percent chance?

I mean, I knew about Melanie, but I didn’t know about the rest of them. She never told me, I didn’t know, it wasn’t in Drake’s videos or…She probably thought I knew because—

Her hand…

I started to wheeze.

Her hand…

She had told me. She told me and I didn’t fucking listen. I didn’t fucking hear her.

Information came flying back to me in patches, each bit sticking until it pieced together into some black, macabre obituary.

Hand weakness.

Her reasons for not dating.

Her tubes were tied, her saying she couldn’t adopt Grace because she wouldn’t be here in a year…

No…no no no no no.

I couldn’t breathe.

It was a wrecking ball to my universe. The shattering of everything. A beautiful stained-glass window in a thousand pieces at my feet.

She might be dying. The love of my life might be dying.

And I was going to have to watch.

CHAPTER 26

YOUR WORST

NIGHTMARES RANKED!

VANESSA

After ice fishing, I jogged up the steps and let myself into our room. Adrian was standing in front of the fireplace facing the door when I came in.

“Hey,” I said, pulling off my beanie. “God, I love your family. Your dad’s like a mountain man or something. Do you know he—”

“Are you sick?”

I unraveled my scarf. “What?”

“Sick,” he said again. “Are you sick? Do you have ALS?”

I wrinkled my forehead. “I don’t know…” I stared at him, confused. “Why are you asking me this?”

“I didn’t know…” he breathed.

I blinked at him. “You didn’t know what?”

He shook his head, and I realized how pale he looked. “I didn’t know it was hereditary.”

I felt my face fall. “What do you mean you didn’t know it was hereditary?” I said carefully.

He let out a shuddering breath. “I didn’t watch all your videos. I just…I just watched that one where you talked about meeting me and then ghost peppers—”

“Ghost peppers? That’s not even my channel. That’s Willow Shea’s channel. It was a collab.” My stomach dropped. “Adrian, what are you saying? Are you saying…you actually didn’t know about this?”

“I didn’t know,” he said again.

And then he started to wheeze.

I darted over to him. “Adrian!”

He was doubled over with his hands on his knees, gasping for air.

“You’re having a panic attack. Sit down. Sit.” My heart was thrumming in my ears.

It took me a moment to get him moving, but I finally led him to the edge of the bed.

I crouched in front of him. “Slow down your breathing. You’re hyperventilating. Breathe through your nose. In through your nose, out through pursed lips.”

He took a few labored breaths.

“You need to go to the doctor,” he rasped.

“What?”

“Go to the doctor. I’ll go with you. We need to know if that’s what this is.”

“I…Adrian, you don’t just walk into a doctor’s office and come out with an ALS diagnosis. There’s no test for it.”

He looked me in the eye, breathing shakily through his nose. “There has to be a test for it. People get diagnosed with it.”

“It’s diagnosed by excluding other diseases and monitoring your deterioration. It’s months and months of testing to rule out other things. It can take a year to get a diagnosis—”

“Then go do that.”

I scoffed. “No.”

He stared at me.

“No. I won’t. HIV, human T-cell leukemia, polio, West Nile virus, multiple sclerosis, multifocal motor neuropathy, Kennedy’s disease—they all mimic ALS. I’ll be tested for all of it, poked and prodded in the hospital for months and for what? I either have it or I don’t. And if I do, it’s fatal. There’s nothing they can do about it.”

He blinked at me. “But…but what if that’s not what it is? What if it is something else?”

I shrugged. “Then it won’t progress, and it won’t be a problem. If it’s still around in six months, but nothing else has changed, I’ll have my hand looked at again. But the most likely contender was carpal tunnel, and they’ve already ruled that out.”

He stared at me like I’d gone mad. “How can you live like this?” he said incredulously.

I shook my head. “What choice do I have, Adrian? What choice do I have but to live like this? I’ve always lived like this.”

His breathing was ragged. He looked like he was going to be sick. I felt like I was going to be sick too.

I sat next to him. “Look, let’s just calm down. Okay?” I rubbed his back. “We can talk about this when you’re calmer.”

“No. We talk about it now.” He was so out of breath it took him a minute to say the next thing. “If you don’t have a diagnosis, how can they get you on the right medications?”

I felt my heart shattering.

He knew nothing. None of it. None of the things that I thought he did.

How had this happened? How did something so big slip through the cracks?

“Adrian,” I said gently. “I won’t be taking any medications.”

He froze to stare at me. “What?” he breathed. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not seeking treatment.”

“What do you—you need medications, there’s clinical trials—”

“So I can spend the rest of my short life getting spinal taps and dealing with side effects worse than the disease? In exchange for maybe a couple of extra months of life expectancy? And that’s if they don’t give me a placebo. And treatments?” I scoffed. “Do you know how few medications there are to treat what I might have? Do you know what they do? They give me three months, Adrian. That’s it. Three extra months. Melanie took them. She had headaches and vomiting and was so dizzy and tired she could barely keep her eyes open. She was hooked up to an IV every single day, they had to constantly monitor her blood and her liver function. I don’t want to live like that. I’ll be tied to whatever hospital is treating me, I won’t be able to travel—”