The Girlfriend (The Boss 2)

There weren’t words, I decided after a long pause. My feet felt as though they’d been super-glued to the floor. Anything I said would sound like goodbye. All I could do was exactly what I had been doing all along. I had to be at his side. I had to be with him and lend him as much strength as I could summon up. If this was the beginning of his last days on earth, I wasn’t going to ruin it with my sadness.

I caught a nurse in the hallway and asked her to show me the way. As we walked up the wide, clean hall, we passed Emma. She was crying, hard, and Michael gave me a pitying smile.

Run. Turn around and run.

No way in hell.

When Dr. Grant had said isolation room, he wasn’t kidding. The room was accessible from an airlock, and there was a window to pass things through, presumably for when he when well enough to get up and come for them. If that happened. Beyond the glass, a nurse in a gown, mask, and puffy surgical cap was hovering over Neil, checking his lines, taking his pulse. He looked pale, even for a transplant patient.

Has this all been worth it? I asked myself. All of the worry? All the depression and loneliness, was it really worth it? You could have stayed in New York. You could have had a life. You’re going to be starting over. No boyfriend. No job. Nothing but a lost year.

And then he opened his eyes and smiled weakly at me, and I knew I wouldn’t trade a moment of what we’d had together.

I wouldn’t have to. As I pressed my palm against the glass and smiled at him through my tears, I knew everything was going to be okay. I loved Neil. Even if he didn’t come out of this, that wouldn’t change. It would be hard— the hardest thing that ever happened to me— but our love wouldn’t change. I would go on with my life. Maybe one day, I would move on and be with someone else. But I would always have Neil. I would always be the girl in the hotel room in Los Angeles. I would always be the woman sitting in the back of her new boss’s car, telling him that he looked different when he was looking at her.

I would always be Neil Elwood’s girlfriend.

I’d thought I’d put my life on hold for him, but I was wrong. I’d been living my life with him. And he would still be a part of my life, even if he didn’t make it through this.

Being loved by Neil Elwood was far more than I’d ever hoped for. If we had a future, I would take it. I really hoped we had a future. But if we didn’t...

This could be enough. Just having him for this short time could be enough.

I kept my hand pressed to the glass, and I smiled at him, and he smiled back at me. My lover, my love, my best friend.

He would always be mine. And I was, irrevocably, his.

EPILOGUE

You know what’s awesome about London? Pretty much everything, when you’re not so busy worrying about your boyfriend’s cancer to enjoy it. I dreaded going back to New York, though Neil had warned me to expect a lot of pond hopping once he went back to work after the holidays. We were going to try to stay in the US as much as possible, but my job was really flexible, these days. Either way, my resident visa was well on the way to being completed, and I was totally in love with my new part-time home.

My memoir about living through cancer with Neil would be released in March of the next year. It was only November, and already the publisher was sending out promotional packets and first-looks. The publicity push would be huge, and though India had warned me not to pin too many hopes to the release of a debut book, I also had my impending audition for a spot on network television. I was on top of the world.

There wasn’t much of a reason not to be. After a scary twenty days of hospitalization following the transplant, Neil had come home. His strength had returned; it had taken him three months to be able to walk to the bathroom without getting winded. But slowly, our lives had shifted focus from all things cancer, to something more close to normal. One by one, bits of medical equipment moved out of our home. Doctor appointments became farther apart on our schedules. And at the one hundred day mark post transplant, he was mostly normal again.

I jogged up the steps to the front door of the house in Belgravia, balancing my shopping bags. I may have gone slightly overboard, but I had been itching to spend my book advance, instead of Neil’s money, for a change. I dropped my purchases to the foyer floor and called out, “I’m home,” on the off chance Neil might be close enough to hear me. The high-dose chemotherapy and transplant had really damaged his hearing. I tried not to tease him about it, because it made him feel “old,” but sometimes, it was kind of funny.