The Last Love Note(34)

It’s so stuffy in here. I get off the bed and start pacing and fanning myself. Breathing too fast.

The windows won’t open. I need air. And a healthy husband who isn’t going to lose his fucking memory before he’s forty.

‘Katie,’ he says, with altogether too much grace. ‘We’ll get through this.’

And that’s when I lose it. Only one of us will be getting through this, and that person is me. Why does it have to be Cam who is sick?

I get an impeccably timed text from Grace. ‘Any news?’

I look at Cam, who I promised to love until death parted us, assuming we meant some time in our eighth or ninth decades. Not this decade. Our baby hasn’t even been born yet, and one of its parents is . . . well, he’s . . . I can’t even say it.

‘SOS, Grace. It’s fucked.’





16





Our first instinct is to adopt a ‘business as usual’ approach. No admitting defeat. No brooding. We’ll keep ourselves active and distracted while all of this sinks in.

Complete denial, in other words.

‘Alzheimer’s?’ Mum probes, when I call in to break the news.

‘Early onset, obviously,’ I explain. ‘You can get dementia at any age.’

A chilling fear rises within me that it’s something that could strike Charlie, too. He could well be genetically predisposed. And not just Charlie. The baby.

Would we have so carelessly conceived if we’d known?

‘Katherine, this is unfortunate,’ Mum says. It’s the first time in my life I’ve known her to underplay a situation. It shows how out of her depth she is that she can’t muster more of a frenzy.

When Cam and I sit ourselves down in front of Zoom to tell his parents in England, their beaming faces come into view and part of me wants to hold off. I have the ludicrous thought that maybe Cam can wait out their deaths. We don’t know how long it will take for more symptoms to develop. They’re in their late eighties now and can’t travel all this way. Why can’t we hide this from them? Spare them the agony. Maybe they would get Alzheimer’s themselves and there’d be no point telling them at all . . .

‘How are you feeling, Kate?’ his mum asks. She’s warm and grandmotherly, and I wish we lived closer. I desperately need one of her hugs.

I’m at a complete loss as to how to answer her question. She’s talking about the pregnancy, of course, and last they knew, everything here was going swimmingly.

‘Mum, Dad, there’s something we need to tell you,’ Cam says. ‘And I wish it was better news.’

They’re instantly worried and move closer together at the kitchen table.

‘Is it the baby?’ his mum asks, and we shake our heads.

‘Not Charlie?’

‘Charlie’s fine,’ I say quickly.

‘I’ve been having trouble with my memory lately,’ Cam begins. ‘Little things, mostly. Errors of judgement . . .’

We already agreed to leave out the bit about the car accident. Why worry them with unnecessary detail?

‘The doctors think it’s Alzheimer’s,’ he says, and I watch as my parents-in-law are suspended in time. The laptop screen looks frozen but isn’t. They look at Cam like he’s still the six-year-old boy who used to climb trees in their back garden and trample mud onto the freshly mopped linoleum in the kitchen. Not the internationally lauded professor, near the top in his field.

Then their faces fall. Apparently the British stiff upper lip does not apply when your incredible son tells you he has an incurable brain disease. And nor should it.



I’m in the toilets at work only days after his diagnosis, staring at my reflection in the mirror, adding up pregnancy symptoms. Actually, it’s more that I’m adding up the number of symptoms I did have and now don’t.

Nausea? Gone.

Sore boobs? Gone.

Ligament twinges? Gone.

Exhaustion? Still exhausted, but as my husband has just been diagnosed with a terminal disease and I’m in the process of re-writing our entire future, I give myself a bit of leeway.

I had the first hint of a crampy, dragging feeling about an hour ago, and now I’m standing in here, scared to look. Surely the universe wouldn’t be so cruel as to remove half of my little family in one week. Since the diagnosis, I’ve been struggling with the idea of raising Charlie and the baby on my own. I don’t know how to do parenting without Cam. He’s the composed one. The intuitive one. What if I brought this on myself?

I remember the day I got my first period on my thirteenth birthday, at my horse-riding party, being terrified to look, scared of the evidence, trying to pretend this wasn’t happening. I’d have twice as many periods for the rest of my life if I could just avoid seeing evidence of bleeding this one time. I’m not religious but I find myself bargaining with whoever’s listening.

But I think I’ve used up all my favours. I’ve already spent a week bargaining about Cam. I started small. Save him and I’ll give up coffee for life. Spare my husband and I’ll never eat chocolate again. Never have wine. Never buy another book.

Then I ramped it up a notch. I’ll give up everything I own. I’ll live alone. Save Cam and I’ll give him up. I would do almost anything to keep him alive.