⸻
I felt my breath catch completely. I’d mentioned that exactly once, early in our relationship, a small, half-forgotten detail I hadn’t thought Foster had even fully registered at the time.
⸻
Desmond handed me a sealed envelope, my name written across the front in Foster’s familiar, slightly slanted handwriting.
I opened it right there in that office, unwilling to wait even the short drive home.
⸻
Adrienne,
If you’re reading this, it means I ran out of time before I ever found the courage to tell you the truth myself, the way I always promised myself I eventually would.
Three weeks before I ended things, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. The doctors gave me somewhere between eight and fourteen months, depending on how my body responded to treatment. I chose fourteen. I got exactly eleven.
⸻
I didn’t tell you, because I watched what happened to my own father when my mother got sick — years of his life consumed entirely by her illness, years he never got back afterward, even once she was gone. I couldn’t do that to you. Six months in, I still believed I had time to fall in love slowly, carefully, the normal way. I didn’t have that luxury anymore, and I refused to let you spend whatever time I had left watching me disappear one appointment at a time.
⸻
I had to stop reading for a moment, my hands pressed against my mouth, Grace’s hand settling gently on my shoulder from the chair beside me.
⸻
I know walking away the way I did was cruel. I know “you’ll understand one day” wasn’t nearly enough of an explanation for what I was actually asking you to carry. I told myself, at the time, that a clean, sudden ending would hurt you less than months of slowly watching someone you loved die. I still don’t know if that was actually true, or if I simply couldn’t face watching your face change every single time you looked at me differently.
⸻
I thought about you every single day after that phone call, Adrienne. I kept the umbrella in my car the entire time, even though I never had a reason to hand it to you again.
⸻
I asked Desmond to structure things this way — requiring you to actually be in the room — because I needed you to hear this directly, not read about it secondhand in some letter mailed to your apartment months from now. I needed you to understand it wasn’t about you not being enough. It was about me being too much of a coward to let you watch me become someone you’d have to grieve slowly instead of all at once.
⸻
Finish your degree. Please. I remember exactly how your whole face changed the one time you mentioned giving it up. I couldn’t fix my own ending, but I could at least try to fix that.
I loved you completely, for exactly as long as I let myself.
Foster
