Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 98652 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 493(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98652 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 493(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
God, I missed this.
I missed her.
How could I have thought I was living before?
We kissed for a long time, and when it broke, her slack jaw began to tighten almost immediately.
“I can’t do this again, Hunter. You hurt me.”
I leaned my forehead to hers. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry I hurt you. I’m crazy about you. I didn’t mean for it to happen. Just the opposite. I wanted to keep you from being hurt.”
After a minute of shallow breathing, she swallowed. “I don’t understand, Hunter. You hurt me because you wanted to keep me from being hurt? That doesn’t make any sense. What’s going on?”
I looked into her eyes. It was the moment of truth. For the last ten years I’d hidden behind a disease I wasn’t even sure I had. I wanted to live, and I wanted to live for and with this woman.
“We need to sit down and talk.”
She nodded. “Let’s go in the living room. My mother went to my sister’s to babysit. She won’t be home for hours. We’ll have privacy.”
I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing. I wasn’t sure this wouldn’t end in even more of a colossal disaster than the last time, but I needed to take a leap of faith. Sitting on the couch, I clasped my hands, looked down, and silently said a little prayer. I hadn’t done that since my brother’s funeral.
Then I started at the beginning …
“When my mother was ten, her mother went in for routine knee surgery and died on the operating table. She had a latent heart condition that caused complications with the anesthesia. Because of that, my mother grew up with an irrational fear of doctors. Then, when my brother and I were little, our father died from head trauma suffered during a car accident. Because he was awake at the scene of the accident and died later in the hospital, my mother blamed the hospital for his death, too. It exacerbated her fear of doctors, and she basically never went to one again.
“When I was nine, we started to see signs of her having Parkinson’s disease. I don’t know how long before that it had started, but at that point, she couldn’t hide it anymore. Her hands would shake, and she had trouble walking. Because she refused to go to doctors, my uncle treated her as best as he could and made a diagnosis from observations. But she would never take any of the medications he prescribed and wouldn’t get blood work done. She died at home when I was seventeen.”
I paused. “I know you know some of this. But I need to tell everything from the beginning.”
She reached over and took my hand. Squeezing, she said, “Take your time.”
“My brother started showing symptoms of what seemed like Parkinson’s in his late teens. He didn’t tell us about it until he couldn’t hide it, either.”
“Oh God. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize Parkinson’s struck so young.”
“It usually doesn’t. But Jayce didn’t have Parkinson’s disease. Neither did my mother.”
“I don’t understand.”
I took a deep breath and held her gaze as I spoke. “They had Huntington’s disease. It’s a genetic condition. My brother had early-onset, which causes a rapid deterioration compared to adult-onset. It’s basically like having Parkinson’s combined with ALS. By the time he was in his early twenties, he struggled to walk or feed himself. He’d started to choke trying to swallow his own saliva. He hung himself to end his life. I found him.”
Natalia’s hand flew to her mouth, and tears began to stream down her face. “I’m so sorry. Huntington’s is a horrible disease.”
“Thank you.”
I looked away, not wanting her to see the tears forming in my eyes, and worked to swallow them. A salty burn scratched at my throat. When my eyes returned to hers, they were met with heartbreak and compassion. As I worked up the courage to finish the story, to tell her the reason I’d basically run away from her, her sad eyes grew wide as saucers.
She’d put the rest together herself.
“It’s a genetic disease?” she said.
I nodded.
“So that means it’s hereditary, right?”
I looked in her eyes. “It can be. Huntington’s has a fifty percent chance of passing to the child of a person who carries the genetic mutation.” I took a deep breath and conjured up every last bit of courage I had to say the words I’d never said to anyone but Derek out loud. “After my brother died, I chose not to have the test. I didn’t want to live my life waiting for symptoms. But after I left you and went back to California, I realized I wasn’t living my life at all. So I finally had the test done last week. The results should be in by the end of this week.”