“This might have nothing to do with you or your relationship with him,” Levi said quietly. “This might just be about him, and, Jane, you may have to accept that.”
“He still should’ve told me right away.” She hugged herself, staring out the window. “He knows I’m going to be gone again soon.”
“Is it possible that he didn’t want to spend the last of his time with you talking about death and being sick, or defending his choice of treatment? That he just wanted to soak up every moment he could with you before you go?”
There was a tightness to his voice, but she shook her head. “He chose no treatment. None. Zero. Zilch.”
“Again, his choice.”
Fueled by panic and anxiety and fury, she whirled on him. “Are you actually trying to defend his decision to me? There are treatments available, Levi. There is no defense for what he’s doing.”
“I assume you’ve talked to him about this. Calmly. Rationally. No judgment.”
She tossed up her hands. “Of course I haven’t. I came straight here.” She felt her eyes fill. “I’m just so mad at him,” she whispered. “So mad.”
He nodded and came slowly toward her, making his way through the roadblocks without any trouble. “It’s understandable,” he said. “But it’s possible he made his choice before you were back in his life.”
She stared at him as his words hit her like a one-two punch to the solar plexus. “So it’s my fault for not reaching out to him sooner?”
“No, of course not. But I do think he might’ve made a different choice now—something you won’t know unless you talk to him.”
She pressed the heels of her hands to her temples. “You don’t get it. His decision was made months and months ago, and cancer doesn’t waste time. There’s no going back and fixing this in the here and now.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Oh, Mr. Fix-It, but I do know it. I accessed his records, Levi. All of them.”
He was toe-to-toe with her now, but not touching her, looking suddenly both incredulous and angry, and she’d like to know what he could possibly have to be angry about. She was the angry one, as was her right.
“Let me make sure I understand,” he said carefully. “You said he seemed off. Then he told you he had cancer, and you pressed for more information and he showed you his medical records. Yes?”
She looked away. “He did seem off. And I didn’t press him for answers because he wouldn’t have given them to me.”
“So you, what, accessed them without permission, meaning you risked your entire nursing career, not to mention your license, to avoid a difficult conversation with your grandpa?”
Shit. Well, when he put it like that . . . But her fuse had been lit, which meant rational thought and logic were backed up behind the huge ball of emotion in her throat. “Family matters more than any job,” she said. “Or at least it should. And you’re one to talk about avoiding a difficult conversation. You made up a pretend girlfriend!”
“Guilty. And for the record, I stopped pretending a long time ago. As I told you, this”—he paused to gesture between them—“is real for me, Jane. Very real.”
She sucked in a breath. She was never going to get used to that.
Levi gave her a small, tight smile. “But clearly you haven’t gotten there yet.”
“I haven’t let myself go there,” she corrected. Paused. “I do know you’re important to me, Levi. Very important.”
“As important as your job? As important as your love of going far and wide without any tether longer than the length of your next contract?”
“Work doesn’t factor into this.”
“The hell it doesn’t. Work gives you an excuse to leave.”
For a heart-stopping moment, she was eight years old again, too much trouble to keep, to fight for, to want. She’d fixed that, though, by always leaving first. “That’s not fair.”
“No? You’re the one who, in the same sentence about your grandpa’s cancer, also talked about leaving Tahoe. How convenient for you to have a built-in escape route. But things change, Jane, and you could change with them. Because no one’s asking you to leave this time. You don’t have to take another contract. You could stay here and enjoy the time you have left with your grandpa.”
She stared at him, trying to fight the rising panic she couldn’t explain. Maybe because he made it all sound so simple when it was anything but. Wasn’t it? “I’ve never lied to you. You’ve always known I was going to leave.”
He looked . . . disappointed. Hurt. “You’re running away again, this time from people who really care about you, because you’re too afraid of getting hurt to even try and build a real relationship.”
Is that what she was doing? Finding reasons to take off before she could be asked to leave? Holy shit. Abruptly, she sat down on the couch, ashamed and furious with herself. She didn’t know how to respond.
Levi sat on the coffee table facing her.
Still not touching her . . .
The silence stretched where she didn’t say anything, could hardly even think over the blood pounding in her ears and the panic squeezing her throat. Panic, because this was it. She was going to lose her grandpa and Levi in one fell swoop because of the ever-present desperate need to run from anything that made her feel too much.
“Jane, what do you want me to do here?”
“I want you to do whatever you want,” she said dully.
He nodded and stood. “All right.” He was clearly waiting for her to do something. Walk out, she realized, so she stood too, and without another word, did just that, without looking back. That was the trick, she reminded herself. Never look back.
But for the first time, she wanted to.
Chapter 28
Levi heard the front door shut and felt it reverberate in his gut. Well, you screwed that up pretty good, didn’t you.
He ran his hands through his hair and then asked himself why he wasn’t going after the best thing to ever happen to him. To hell with that, and he strode down the stairs and to the front door.
Jane’s car was gone.
Okay, so onto the gut-wrenching portion of the evening, apparently. He turned in a slow circle in the living room, wondering how in the world he was such an idiot when it came to women. And why had he ever made that stupid promise to not fall for her? He stopped when he realized the double doors leading to the kitchen were closed.
They were never closed.
He pushed them open and his entire family leapt away from the doors, trying to look busy. His mom was suddenly doing dishes, his dad reading his newspaper—upside down, which wasn’t a dead giveaway at all—and his sister was searching through a drawer looking for . . . he had no idea. He doubted she knew either. Only his niece was left standing suspiciously close to the wall next to the kitchen door.
The eavesdropping wall.
She gave him a guileless smile. “Hi! We had our ears to the wall listening to you and Jane upstairs. Grandma was using a glass cuz she said it carries sound better.”
Levi cut his eyes to his mom, who had the good grace to grimace. “Kids,” she said. “They say the darnedest things.”