“Technically?” I ask when he looks up at me.
“Okay. We’re doing this,” he says, under his breath. “Day one, pulling out the big guns.” He laughs half-heartedly.
“I’m sorry,” I say, shaking myself. “We don’t have to…”
“Did you want to take that walk to the beach? Together? I always find it easier to walk and talk about heavier shit, you know?”
I do know. That’s what I went to school for, at some level.
“Yeah, sure.” I nod and stand from the couch. “Give me a few minutes to change.”
A little while later, we’re both dressed in warmer layers and halfway to the water. We’ve walked mostly in silence so far, making fleeting comments about cute dogs as they pass us by or how lovely the weather feels after an otherwise moody winter.
When we arrive at the beach, it’s empty. The sand is nearer to mud in colour, wet and partially covered with half-frozen puddles in its valleys. The rocky shore is hidden under snow that’s already begun melting under today’s golden sun. The lake’s ice is thin enough to see through and cracking all over. The sky is a hazy blue with soft, wispy clouds, as if a painter dried their brush against the horizon.
A perfect late-winter day.
A hopeful, spring-is-closer-than-you-think type of day.
I feel it all thawing my weary bones. The sunshine, the birds singing, the breeze that isn’t frigid enough to hurt my skin. A sign of all the good to come when winter ends. When I can spend my days outside, feeling more like myself.
It isn’t until we stop at the shoreline that Bo seems to begin collecting his thoughts once again. This time, I wait patiently for him to offer me whatever he wants. I shouldn’t have pried, considering there’s a lot I’m not quite ready to tell him about my last relationship, so I won’t again.
I collect a few stones from the shore and silently offer them to him with an open palm. He takes one, smiles politely, and tosses it. We both watch as it skates across a patch of ice before sliding into the water. I throw one too. It lands directly in a patch of the lake with no ice at all. I watch the ripples form and fade to nothing.
“I got diagnosed a few months after Cora and I called things off for the third time,” Bo says, his voice wayward but strong. “She, uh, she and I were on different wavelengths for most of the relationship. We kept, I kept, trying to fight the inevitable that we just didn’t work. We started dating at twenty-three, and it was simpler when we were just two people focused on our careers who were working in the same field and trying to get ahead. But eventually, we were left constantly trying to figure out how we slotted into each other’s lives outside of work, reconciling that we weren’t a very good fit.” He licks his lips, looking at the water with a furrowed brow and stoic concentration.
“God, it’s pretty fucking pathetic to say out loud… but I think, maybe, she just never loved me as much as I loved her?” He says it like a question, looking down at me as if I might have the answer. I don’t. Can’t.
I think I’ve maybe already said too much, actually. Reducing Cora to this caricature villain instead of someone Bo shared years of his life with. Despite how she’s treated Sarah or me, I don’t know Cora all that well. Clearly, Bo does. And clearly, he loved her.
“Admittedly, there were a lot of reasons I shouldn’t have called her the day I found out I was sick, but… I did. I was really fucking scared and… lonely. I’d never felt so alone.” He laughs without humour, a hand splayed along his jaw as he grinds his back teeth.
I pick up a few more stones and offer one to him. He gives me a curt nod before he takes one and tosses it so far that I have to squint to see it land.
“I had friends I could’ve called, I guess. But I wasn’t sure if any of them would know how to help. I needed company. I needed tough love, which Cora always had in spades.” I hand him another stone, and he tosses it. This time it’s a shallower, weaker throw. He shoves his hands deep into his pockets, widening his stance slightly as his chest falls on a long breath.
“I wanted to call my dad, but I was worried about burdening him. He lost his wife decades before my diagnosis, and he’d still never really moved on. I didn’t have it in me to tell him that he could be losing his only son too. Cora was there when I didn’t know who else to call, and I’m always going to be grateful she showed up for me.”
“I’m glad she was there for you too,” I say softly. And I mean it. Though it creates an ache in my chest. Perhaps it’s guilt. Could be jealousy. Or, more accurately, both.
“A month into treatment, Cora sort of announced to me that we’d be getting married. I know it makes me sound like an idiot, but I kinda just went along with it. Everything in my life felt unstable and untethered, and suddenly, there was this woman I love telling me she was choosing to stick it out with me. I wanted that stability.”
I feel a thrum of energy pass through me from head to toe. It hits my chest with a gentle but noticeable blow. Love. In the present tense. Bo loves Cora.
“But when the chemo wasn’t working and the cancer was progressing, amputation became the only option. And… the odds were looking bleak regardless.” We naturally fall back into walking at a relaxed pace toward the pier with a small lighthouse and empty docks where locals keep their boats during warmer months.
“At that point, I think it got to be too much for her. She stopped coming to appointments. Stopped coming over entirely. Eventually, she stopped answering my calls too. I got the message that she needed to step away from it all, and we haven’t talked since. Not a lot of closure, I know. But… part of me feels like that’s for the best, honestly. She was there for me when I needed her, and I think she did me a favour… in the long run.”
“I don’t think she did you a favour by leaving you when you needed her most. That’s a pretty cowardly thing to do. She should’ve at least told you to your face that she couldn’t handle it. Let you have that… proper end.”
Bo shrugs. “She’d already ended things before, though. I was the one who tried to fix it every time—why we kept getting back together. Maybe she knew that was how it had to play out. She had to hurt me so I’d let her go. And I doubt many people would stick around when the worst-case scenario seemed inevitable.”
I would, I think. Then immediately berate myself for placing myself morally above Cora, even inside my own thoughts. Ultimately, I don’t know what I’d do in that situation. I doubt I’d have left him, though. I don’t really understand how anyone could do such a thing. Even imagining what that would have felt like has me near tears, has me wanting to reach out for his hand or tuck him against my chest and brush my hand over his hair. Protect him from it, shield him, as if I could change the past.
“When did you tell your dad?” I ask.
“About six hours before the surgery…” he says, then trills his lips, looking away from me sheepishly.
I groan. “Yikes.”
“Yeah… not my best work.”
“How did he take it?”
“Um, not great,” Bo says in a higher pitch than usual, some humour returning to his features. “He reverted to his native tongue to call me every name in the book, then got the first flight out. He stayed with me for three months after the surgery. I couldn’t have gone home without his help. I don’t know what I would’ve done, actually.”