It filled me with panic. We were running out of time! What was she doing sitting around in the garden and making soup and crocheting blankets with a deadline like this? There had to be something more important for her to do with her time than watch ’80s rom-coms. Weren’t there people to see? Conversations to have? Travel?

Or maybe she just wanted to sit in the garden and breathe.

Complicated—always so complicated with Diana.

I don’t know how long I sat out in that hallway with my head in my hands. An hour? Two? All I knew was, once I went into her room and saw her again, knowing what I knew now, it would be real. And I didn’t want it to be real.

I stalled as long as I could. I stalled so long that when I finally forced myself through her door, she was asleep for the night. The lights were all dimmed, and the room was shadowy. I could make out the bruise on her forehead easily—it was almost black—but I didn’t get too close. I didn’t want to wake her.

Also, she wasn’t wearing her eye patch. It was the first time since I’d arrived that I could see her face, unobstructed. Would I have been able to tell, if I’d seen? Maybe. I could see that the eye itself was a bit distended. But otherwise, there she was.

My mother. Exactly the same as always—and totally different.

I lowered myself into the visitor’s chair beside her, held very still, and watched her sleeping face. I tried to imagine a world without Diana in it, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

How had I wasted so much time? How had I let one disappointment shape the course of our relationship? More than that, why had I decided to blame her for everything that happened with Heath Thompson? Stupid. And wrong. Why hadn’t I tried harder to see things clearly? Ten years I’d simmered in my own self-righteousness, holding my grudge against her as if the only way to win was to stay mad the longest.

As if there had ever been anything to win.

As if you don’t always lose by definition when you push the people who love you away.

All she’d wanted was forgiveness. And I had flat-out refused to give it to her.

I will always remember that moment of my life—that night in the hospital, crouched in a chair in my mother’s gray room, groping my way through the news of her death sentence, feeling it all, but completely numb at the same time.

I see it frozen in time, as if it’s a painting.

In the memory, it’s not my adult self, in my Lillian uniform with my crutches, that I see in that chair. It’s me as a child, wearing my favorite nightgown from when I was about eight—the one with ruffles and little hearts. I’m barefoot, with those soft, chubby feet children have. My hair is long, and my mother has just brushed it before bed. And then I stand up in the painting and walk out of my place. I crawl into the hospital bed beside her, suddenly as small and lost as I’d ever been, trembling, gasping for air, seeing it all, every implication of everything I’d just learned, and at the same time, blinded by a fog of incomprehension.

I wedge myself between her and the railing.

I press against her soft warmth.

And I beg her with everything I’ve got not to leave me.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING, when my mother opened her eyes, I was standing by her bed, assessing her bruise.

She met my eyes. Then she said, “Oh, sweetheart. They told you.”

I nodded, trying to stand up taller—as if that might make me braver.

She held out her hand to me.

I took it. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“I just wanted to have some fun while we could.” She gave me a smile. “This kind of news can be so depressing.”

I gulped a little unexpected laugh.

“I just wanted to see you,” she said, squeezing my hand. “I just wanted a little taste of how it used to be before … I knew Wallace was dying when I married him. But sometimes I wish I hadn’t known. It’s so hard to feel happy and sad at the same time.”

Suddenly, I felt for her. For the first time ever, I looked at that moment when she drove away through her eyes—and with her heart. What must it have felt like to give up her husband and child for a man she knew she would also have to lose?

It must have been agony in every direction.

For the first time, I understood. In all the times I’d remembered that story, I’d experienced every single part of it from my own perspective, standing in my own sixteen-year-old shoes. Now, for the first time, I saw it unfold from a new angle. Hers.

And it changed the story.

I felt a wash of forgiveness through my body.

Now it was me, suddenly, who wanted forgiveness.

“I’m sorry I was so angry at you for so long,” I said then.

She was ready for it. She patted me, like, Nonsense. “You were a kid. Sometimes it’s easier to be angry.”

“I was so stupid. I blamed you for things that weren’t your fault.”

“You were standing up for yourself. That’s a good thing.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

She went on. “You thought I had rejected you, so you rejected me harder. It was very sensible, really. Self-protection. I admired it.”

“But it was more complicated than that.”

“You did what you needed to do to be okay. I always believed you’d come back to me. I just ran out of time to wait.”

“I get it now, I think,” I said. “I get what you said about love being powerful.”

She nodded. “I bet you do.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I wasted so much time.”

She squeezed my hand again. “That’s just the human condition, sweetheart. We’re always doomed to waste our time.”

My brain was circling around, trying to put all the new information together. “That’s it, then? You’re not doing any treatments?”

“Did the doctor show you the brain scans?”

I nodded.

She gave me a look like, Well, there’s your answer.

“I don’t know what to do now.”

“Just be here,” she said. “Just be nearby.”

More tears from me.

“It’s okay. It’s better in a way,” she said. “We aren’t meant to last forever. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend my last year getting cut up and drugged. I’d much rather be in the garden. Or painting pottery. Or walking by the ocean.”

Of course, you can’t argue with walking by the ocean, but when the end result of that is dying, it sounds a little less ideal.

“There’s nothing else to try? Nothing even experimental?”

“There was some experiment I could have joined, but I declined. It sounded awful.”

I sat up. “What? Really? What was it?”

“Some new drug. Some clinical trial. I said no.”

“What? Why would you say no?”

“I don’t want to take any more drugs. I’ve had enough medical intervention for a lifetime.”

“But it’s just medicine.”

“With gruesome side effects. The least gory of which is ‘fatal skin infection.’”

“I’m just saying, what if it worked?”

“What if it didn’t? And then I’m killed by my own skin?”

“At least that way, there’s a chance.”