She could concentrate on medical supplies and a race that would, fortunately, require all her attention.
“You’re allowed to talk about him, you know. I may not agree with what you’re doing, but you can always talk to me about any of it. You need to talk to someone, Riley.”
She shrugged off Anne’s gentle hand at her back and moved to organize the boxes, even though they were fine the way they were. “What’s there to talk about? I have multiple sclerosis, I’m eventually going to end up in a wheelchair, and that doesn’t really jive with the lifestyle of the world’s premier adventure sport YouTube star.”
Not just YouTube. The Adventure Channel had contacted Riley about hosting his own weekly show, Phoenix Rises. He’d be traveling to even more remote and exotic locations than he already did. More excitement. More adventure. More of everything that Riley, Phoenix, was good at. He loved it, and people loved him for it.
Including her.
There was no fucking way she was tying him to her and this fucking condition.
She was already not adventurous enough for someone like him. Throw in a deteriorating central nervous system in a body that was attacking itself…
The best thing she could do for Riley was to get out of his life.
Anne let out a sigh. “We’ve been over this. Every case of MS is different. You may not need a wheelchair until you’re seventy, if you even need one at all. All the indications—”
“I know what the research says, Anne, but you and I both know there are no guarantees either way. Breaking up with Riley was the right thing to do.”
She’d done it three days ago, when the confirmed MS diagnosis had come through. For weeks she’d been hoping otherwise, but deep inside she’d known. She’d been a nurse for too long not to figure it out.
The involuntary muscle spasms, dizziness, loss of balance, fatigue… Her body was turning on itself. The MRI had confirmed it.
She and Riley had been supposed to video chat the next day, but she’d canceled, telling him she had to work.
Her entire life had just been turned upside down. She couldn’t face him—even from thousands of miles away, he would’ve known something was terribly wrong. Would’ve gotten the truth out of her.
So she’d called him the next day—he’d just been getting back from some unscheduled stop in Egypt—and told him their relationship was over. Some bullshit about distance and changing and growing apart. She had hung up before he could ask too many questions. She had been curt with, or ignored, his many texts since.
She hadn’t quite been able to breathe since then. Or sleep. Or eat.
She couldn’t go on this way. So she was glad to have WAR to focus on. Riley was in Sri Lanka, then heading to some other parts of Southeast Asia—a problem for another day.
“I just want to concentrate on the race and getting everyone through this safely.”
“Okay.”
She turned to face her friend. “Okay? That’s it?”
Anni-e gave her the quiet smile she was near famous for. “Like I said, I may not agree with you not telling Boy Riley, but you’re my friend, and I’ll support you in whatever way I can. If that means avoiding the issue for a little while and watching grown-ass adults do ridiculously dangerous and stupid things for fun…I’m in.”
Riley would be with the racers all week as medical support. Anne would be here off and on to provide backup as needed.
Anne went back to her list, and Riley turned back to the supplies, grabbing a box of gauze to move to the other side of the table. But she twisted the wrong way and knocked over a stack of ibuprofen.
“You okay over there?” Anne asked.
“It’s not the damn MS, okay?” Riley snapped. “I’m just clumsy.”
A pause. “Clumsy is allowed too,” Anne said softly.
Riley scrubbed a hand down her face. She was being a bitch. Anne hadn’t said anything about MS. Riley didn’t even know if that was what the woman had been thinking.
But pretty soon it would be. Soon it would be all anyone thought when they thought of Riley. Her MS.
She refused to let it be all Boy Riley associated with her too.
Anne came over and silently helped her restack the fallen boxes.
“I’m sorry.” Riley reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’m a bitch.”
Anne shook her head. “No need to apologize. You’re coming to terms with something life changing. Nobody would blame you for needing a minute to adjust.”
How did one adjust to this? How did one adjust to the knowledge that one’s entire life could change with one sentence from a doctor’s mouth?
She was a nurse, for God’s sake. She knew how much worse it could be. There were some people who’d just been given a diagnosis of cancer or a tumor or some other terminal illness who would give anything if their diagnosis were only MS.
Only MS.
Yet it was causing Riley’s world to crash in pieces around her.
Enough already. “I think I’ve used up today’s quota of self-pity and bitchiness. Are you ready to head to the starting line? We can help get the athletes checked in.”
“Listen. I know you’re throwing yourself into this race so you don’t have to think about the diagnosis or the breakup”—Riley shot Anne a narrowed-eyed look and her friend held a hand out in a gesture of surrender—“and that’s fine. Avoiding short-term is fine. It gives your subconscious a chance to adjust. But long-term, you’re going to have to really deal with this. You need to talk to your friends about what’s going on with you. Wavy or Peyton.”
“You’re my friend. I’ve talked to you about it.”
Anne shook her head. “You’ve talked to me, very briefly, about medical specifics only. Concerns about your job, not about how you’re feeling or processing everything happening to you. I’m more than happy to talk to you about that too, but you’ve always been close with Wavy and Peyton. They both would want to help.”
She scrubbed a hand across her face. Peyton had just reconnected with the love her of life and Wavy had problems of her own. “I know. I will. I just…can’t. Not yet. Not any of it.”
Anne let out a soft sigh. “And Boy Riley…The MS diagnosis and all that comes with it is hard enough without losing the man you love in the middle of it.”
She knew. Oh God, she knew. Felt the five-hundred-pound weight of it all on her chest every second. “I think getting all the hard over with at one time might be easier in the long run.”
“You can’t hide it from him forever, Ry. I know he wasn’t raised in Oak Creek like so many of us, but he considers this home now. He’s going to find out.”
“I know.” Riley looked down at her hand on the boxes. It was shaking. But once again it had nothing to do with MS. “But I’m not going to trap him with me—guilt him into staying.”
“You guys have been together for three years. There’s no guilt. He loves you. Honestly, we all thought you would get married.”
“No. He knows how I feel about marriage. We’ve never even talked about it.”
Except for once. But then the universe had sent a sign that it wasn’t meant to be. And now it had sent another one. A big-ass one.