Daisy

I sat with it for a long moment.

All of it. The doctor’s appointment. The switched-off phone. The cancer he had carried alone through our entire marriage, through my pregnancy, through Treasure’s birth — smiling at me every morning, holding my hand, and being everything I needed while quietly falling apart inside.

He had been dying, and I hadn’t known.

He had missed my calls because he was in a hospital trying to find a way to stay alive for us.

Three years. Three years I had hated him for something that was never what I thought it was. Three years of building walls and sharpening edges and telling...