“I’m slacking off. That’s what I came to say.” She lowered her hand to her side. “You should’ve expected it. You’re banking on me being a good soldier and not dropping my bundle
, but I’m dropping it right now. I’m working standard office hours from here on in and taking lunch.” She turned for her dramatic but fully clothed exit and said over her shoulder, “You don’t get to say you weren’t warned.”
“Felicity.”
Not turning around for that. He pulled that disciplinarian act when he wanted obedience and she’d had to stomach it for years. She didn’t have to anymore.
“Flick.” She stopped but didn’t turn. “I’ll have a handover plan next week.”
He might. If he didn’t, it was explicitly on him.
The rest of the day was notably easier to get through than the morning had been, and true to her word she quit the office at five thirty and headed straight home and for the gym and maybe the chance to eat with Tom.
Drew called while she was on the street. She could barely hear him. “It’s not Christmas or my birthday or yours either. You didn’t have to call back.”
“I wanted to. Can you talk?”
She ducked into an alleyway, where she could stand without someone walking into her and not have to shout to be heard. “I can now.”
“Where are you?”
“Just left work. You’re not getting my big news early.”
“Flicker, you’ve got to give me your news. I need it now.”
He’d said less than a dozen words and nothing particular about them was unexpected, but she went cold from the feet up. His voice—it wasn’t so much that the street was loud, it was that Drew’s voice shook.
“What’s wrong?”
“Tell me your news. Don’t hold out on me now.”
Unexplained fear laced her heart, making it hard to find words. She told him about Coalition for Humanity, and moving to Washington, about how excited she was and what it meant to be able to share that with him.
“I’m so proud of you, Flicker.”
“I can do this because you saw I could be something.”
“You were already something before I ever set eyes on you. A flicker of brilliance, no one can ever put out.”
That’s all she’d been. A flicker of defiance and undirected anger. Without Drew, she’d have flickered out. “You’re scaring me. You don’t sound right.”
“I’m sick. I’m in the hospital.”
“Oh sweet Jesus. What is it?”
“Cancer.”
He told her what kind and where it was in his body, how he’d been sick for years and why he didn’t tell her before. Lots of words in a voice racked with pain and the certainty he was dying that hit her like a hail of ice bullets, left her shivering and aching.
Her analytic brain kicked into high gear. “But there’s treatment.”
“Some. We can slow it down, manage the pain. I’ll have good days and bad days.”
“How long?”
“Today was a good day because I got to talk to you.”
Oh dear God. “You can talk to me any day. This thing we do, only talking three—”