"Get away from me. Don't touch me!"
In that moment, I felt a revulsion toward him I had never known before.
He stared at me, stunned, unable to form a single word.
His phone cut through the silence, shrill and jarring.
He didn't answer it. Instead, he straightened up and spoke in a rush.
"If you want to lie here, suit yourself."
"Kathy's in a bad mood. She's pregnant, after all. I'm going to take her out to clear her head."
I said nothing. He walked out without a backward glance.
A bitter smile twisted my lips. How had we ended up here?
Louis and I had grown up together. Childhood sweethearts. We started dating at eighteen, and the day I graduated college at twenty-three, we got married.
I never imagined that three years in, I'd discover he'd been keeping Kathy Hughes on the side like a caged songbird.
I'd been ready to divorce him. But then, out of nowhere, he was diagnosed with leukemia.
The very night of his diagnosis, Kathy took off with tens of millions of his money and fled the country.
For the sake of the twenty-some years we'd known each other, I chose to stay and take care of Louis. When the donor match came back positive, I donated my stem cells.