Chương 5
“She didn’t tell us until she was dying,” Vivian said. “She kept saying it was handled. Her husband said she needed privacy. By the time I understood—”
“This is not Margaret,” Ethan said.
“You don’t know what it’s like to find out after every useful choice is gone.”
“You don’t know what choices are useful for Lena.”
“I know what illness does to a family.”
Lena’s fingers tightened around the folded wig.
“So you decided to do it first,” she said.
Vivian frowned.
“You were afraid of being surprised again, so you surprised everyone else. You were afraid of being powerless, so you made me powerless.”
Vivian’s face shifted in a way Lena could not read.
From the courtyard came the sound of voices and the metallic clatter of a gate. Priya checked her phone.
“Reporters are on the street,” she said. “At least two.”
Ethan took off his white rose boutonniere. The petals had been crushed against Lena when he caught her. He set it on the secretary’s desk.
“We’re leaving,” he said.
Vivian reached for his sleeve.
He stepped away before she touched him.
The courtyard gate opened onto a narrow lane behind the cathedral. Reverend Bell’s assistant had moved a delivery van across part of the entrance to block the view from the street. Ethan and Lena climbed into Priya’s car while Daniel argued with a reporter near the corner.
Lena sat in the back seat. Ethan slid in beside her, still in his tuxedo. Priya got behind the wheel and locked the doors.
For several seconds no one spoke.
Then Priya looked at them through the mirror. “Where?”
Lena had no answer. Her apartment was full of flowers and luggage for a honeymoon they had postponed once already because of treatment. Ethan’s townhouse was where photographers would go first. The hotel was crowded with guests and staff.
“My place,” Priya said. “Ravi is taking the kids to his mother’s.”
“You don’t have to displace your family,” Lena said.
“I’m not letting you spend the night alone with the internet and a man who currently looks capable of punching a marble statue.”
Ethan stared out the window. “I’m fine.”
“No one has ever looked less fine while saying that.”
Priya pulled into traffic.
They passed the front of the cathedral. Guests crowded the steps beneath the stone saints. Some held garment bags over formal clothes. Others stood in groups with phones pressed to their ears. A local news van had already parked near the curb.
Lena slid lower in the seat.
Ethan took her hand. This time she let her fingers remain loose in his.
At Priya’s house in Newton, the ordinary disorder of family life waited for them: a plastic dinosaur under the dining table, crayons in a ceramic bowl, a grocery list attached to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like Vermont. Someone had left one sock on the stairs.
Priya gave Lena sweatpants and a cotton shirt. Ethan borrowed clothes from Ravi, who was broader and several inches shorter. The gray T-shirt stretched across Ethan’s shoulders, while the borrowed sweatpants stopped above his ankles.
Under other circumstances Lena would have laughed.
She removed the wedding gown in Priya’s bedroom. Priya unfastened the row of tiny buttons without speaking. The black coat slipped from Lena’s shoulders and pooled on the carpet. Red and blue light from the cathedral had left no mark, though Lena half expected to find color stained into the fabric.
When the gown came away, she stood in compression stockings and a soft surgical bra, pale and thin in the mirror. Her port scar showed beneath her collarbone. Faint adhesive marks remained on her skin from the last infusion.
Priya found a robe.
“Do you want the wig?” she asked.
Lena looked at it on the bed. Without its shape, it resembled a small animal that had died.
“No.”
Priya placed it in a shopping bag, then changed her mind and laid it flat in an empty drawer.
Lena touched her scalp. Three small red marks showed where the clips had pulled.
“Is it bleeding?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not.”
Lena sat on the edge of the bed. “I saw people look at me differently.”
“They were horrified by her.”
“Some were.”
Priya knelt to remove the compression stockings. “You don’t have to decide what every face meant.”
“I know what pity looks like.”
“You also know what shock looks like, and guilt, and rich people realizing they attended the wrong kind of spectacle.”
Lena’s mouth moved despite herself.
Priya looked up. “There. Still alive.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say to a cancer patient.”
“It’s why we’re friends.”
Downstairs, Ethan’s phone rang every few minutes. He did not answer until Daniel called for the fourth time.
Lena and Priya entered the kitchen as Ethan said, “No statement.”
Daniel’s voice was loud enough to carry through the phone.
“Silence leaves a vacuum.”
“Good. Let it suffocate.”
“That is not how this works.”
Ethan stood at the counter with one hand pressed flat beside an untouched glass of water. On the television mounted in the adjoining room, muted footage showed the cathedral exterior. A banner beneath it read MERCER FAMILY WEDDING DISRUPTED BY ON-ALTAR CONFRONTATION.
Priya found the remote and turned the television off.
Daniel continued speaking. Ethan listened, his face hardening.
“What did she say?” he asked.
Lena stopped near the doorway.
Daniel’s answer was indistinct.
Ethan closed his eyes. “Send it to me.”
He ended the call.
“What?” Lena asked.
“My mother released a statement through the foundation.”
Priya leaned against the refrigerator. “Already?”
Ethan opened the message Daniel had forwarded.
May you like
He read silently, then handed the phone to Lena.
The statement was four paragraphs long. It described an “emotionally charged family misunderstanding” during which Vivian had “reacted inappropriately to information she believed had been withheld from her son.” It expressed concern for Lena’s health, requested privacy, and stated that the Mercer Family Foundation remained committed to supporting women facing serious medical diagnoses.
