We sat on the cold front steps, the driveway behind us like a stage where the wrong story had almost played out. His hands trembled as he spoke about scans, survival rates, and the shame of imagining himself as dead weight in my future. I realized I’d mistaken his retreat for indifference, when it was really fear dressed up as distance. My voice cracked as I admitted how the unanswered questions had felt like tiny abandonments, each one carving space between us.

Somewhere between his halting honesty and my own unraveling, the script changed. We decided there would be no more protecting each other with half-truths, no more loving from opposite sides of a closed door. It stopped being a battle between suspicion and secrecy, sickness and resentment. It became a fragile, fierce agreement: whatever came next, we would walk into it side by side, with nothing important left unsaid.