“Sounds like you,” Cassie said. She still remembered the strength her mother had after Cassie’s incident. Judy never cried or got angry. She just got to work. Whatever Cassie needed, her mother was there for her at a moment’s notice.
“Sounds like you,” she said.
Cassie scrunched up her face. There was no reality where she wanted to talk about how brave or strong she was because of what happened. “How did you meet Mrs. Grayson? Did you become friends right away?”
Judy took another turn and shifted in her seat before she answered. “I had already been volunteering at the hospital for a year or two. It made me feel better. I couldn’t help you, so I was hoping I could help other people.”
“Mom—”
“I know that’s not really what was going on, but it made me feel good to make other people happy. When Mary came in, everyone had their own opinion about it. She was Senator Grayson’s wife, so it was obviously a political move. Half the volunteers either wanted to be her friend or wanted to be her enemy. I was just hoping she was willing to put the work in.”
“I’m guessing she was?”
“Mary is wonderful. She’s such a kind person. Sometimes I forget who she’s married to. I’ll never understand how they make it work, but they do. She loves him, but she hates the politics. She always talks about him like he’s two different people. One version is her husband, and the other version is the politician.”
“What made you guys start talking?”
“There was a patient in the hospital who had just died from a brain tumor. I had visited him quite a lot over the last few years. I knew his family. He’d had cancer before, and it went into remission. Then it came back. After three or four rounds of chemo, he was tired. He opted out of further treatment. It was only a matter of time.”
Judy sniffled, and Cassie gave her a moment to collect herself.
“After I found out he’d died, I broke down in a supply closet. Mary was coming in to get some cleaning supplies. She held me for a good half an hour while I sobbed into her sweater. That thing cost more than what I made in a week, but she didn’t care. She just wanted to make sure I was okay. That’s when I found out she had cancer, too.”
“What kind?”
“Lymphoma. She’s had treatment, and it’s in remission, but it’s just a waiting game.”
“I’m sure she has the best doctors.”
“She does, but that doesn’t always save a person’s life.” Judy shook her head. “And now this thing with her son.”
“Did you talk about him much?” Cassie couldn’t stop her detective brain from turning on, but there had to be a reason she had that vision.
“A little. I’d see the newspapers, you know? But I never brought it up. She’d mention it a few times. Trouble at home. Her husband not knowing how to handle him. Her son not knowing how to talk to her husband. She was afraid Connor would leave and never come back.”
Cassie bit her lip to keep from saying anything she’d regret.
“I told her I understood that fear, and it’s the worst feeling in the world.” She kept her eyes locked on the road ahead of her. “I told her not to let it happen, no matter what. She had to hang on to her kid.”
Cassie felt the pain in her mother’s voice, and it broke her heart. She hadn’t given her parents or her sister a choice when she’d told them she didn’t want them to stick around. She’d been too angry back then, too fearful of relying on another person to take care of her.
That fear was still very much alive, but for the first time in her life, she felt strong enough to overpower it.
14
When the nurse called her mother’s name, Judy turned to Cassie with a frown on her face. “Are you sure you’ll be okay out here?”
“I’ll be fine, Mom. Don’t worry about me.”
“That’s never going to happen.”
But Judy patted her arm and followed the nurse through the double doors on the other side of the waiting room, leaving Cassie alone.
Except, of course, she was rarely alone. The waiting room may have been devoid of any other living people, but several ghosts loitered, either pacing the room or sitting patiently in a chair as though another nurse would call their name any minute.
Cassie’s fingers were ice cold although her palms were sweating. Anxiety was a curious beast. The blood had retreated from her extremities to protect her vital organs from a threat that didn’t exist. Her brain told her she was in danger, and her body reacted as though she were face-to-face with a bear in the middle of the woods.
The telltale signs of a panic attack were all too familiar to her. If she could concentrate long enough, she’d be able to slow her racing thoughts, calm her shallow breaths, and pump the blood back into her fingertips.
But that was when she was in the comfort of her own home.
Hospitals were different. The sterile smell of antiseptic spray took her back to a time when she almost forgot what a home should smell like. Fresh-baked cookies and hot coffee and her mother’s ever-present lavender potpourri.
Back then, it was lukewarm meatloaf and Styrofoam cups and bandages that needed changing. But it was also the bright-white lights that never turned off and the constant beeping of monitors and the way they woke you up every few hours to check your vitals. Cassie could sleep all day in a hospital bed and never feel like she’d gotten enough rest.
And the waiting rooms. Sometimes they were worse than the patient rooms. The hushed whispers, the anticipation of bad news, and the skip of your heart whenever the door opened and the nurse called someone’s
