DON’T STOP (Lila and Darrell) novel Chapter 113

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Chapter 11a

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Chapter 113

Daisy

I sat with it for a long moment.

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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 myself that Norman White had simply chosen to not be there, that he hadn’t cared enough, that I had meant so little to him that he couldn’t even answer a phone.

And all along he had been terrified of dying in front of me.

My chest ached with something that didn’t have a clean name – grief and relief and guilt and love all pressed together into something almost unbearable.

wiped my face with the back of my hand and took a slow breath.

How are you feeling now?” I asked softly. “Your health, I mean.”

He smiled. A real one, quiet and genuine. “Never been better.” He paused. “I don’t completely understand it myself, but I was eventually fully healed. Given a second chance.”

I smiled back at him and looked down at my hands.

A second chance.

I let that sit for a moment before the next question surfaced, the one that had been forming since he started talking,

“Then why did you bring the divorce papers?” I looked up at him. “If you were getting better. Why did you decide to end it with me?”

He was quiet for a moment. His hands laced together in his lap, eyes down.

“I blamed myself,” he said. “Every single day. For Treasure. For not being there. For everything.” His voice was steady but only just. “I couldn’t go for my treatments either. For a while I just I felt like I deserved to die. Like that was the right ending for what I had caused.” He paused. “But then I would look at you and see how much you were carrying, and I knew that having me around was only making it harder. You were grieving and healing and trying to keep going, and I was falling

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apat next to you and making everything worse.” He swallowed. “And I didn’t want to die in you Tate, Daisy. I didn’t want you to watch that happen after everything you had already been through

because of me.”

He looked up at me.

“I’m sorry that I chose the worst possible moment to walk away. I am truly sorry for that.”

I laughed.

It came out through the tears, soft and helpless and completely unexpected – the kind of laugh that had nowhere else to go. I wiped my eyes again and shook my head.

“You ridiculous man,” I said quietly.

He smiled at that.

“After the divorce I stopped caring about everything,” he continued, his voice gentler now, like the hardest part was behind us and we were walking on easier ground. “I started smoking. Drinking. Not caring whether the cancer came back or got worse. Part of me was almost inviting it.” He paused. “One day I passed out outside. A neighbor found me and called an ambulance.”

I looked at him.

“When I got to the hospital, I ended up with the same doctor who had been asking me to start treatment for months. He checked me over and told me I miraculously still had a chance. That the window hadn’t completely closed.” He shook his head slightly at the memory. “I didn’t care at that point. I told him as much. But he persisted. He wouldn’t let it go.” A small smile. “Eventually I gave in. Treatment lasted close to a year. And then one day I was better.”

He said it simply. Like it was almost strange to him even now.

‘I started working. Building something. And eventually-” the smile reached his eyes- “I found out you had built something too. A whole company. And my company kept growing, and somehow we couldn’t help but end up in each other’s way.”

He laughed softly.

I laughed too, tears still drying on my cheeks, the afternoon light sitting warm and quiet around us.

“Rivals,” I said.

“Rivals,” he agreed.

We looked at each other for a moment across everything – across Treasure and the divorce and the gala and the hotel and three years of loving each other badly from opposite sides of the same

wound.

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thanked down at my hands

“I didn’t know,” I said quietly. “Any of it. I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t,” he said. “That was my fault.”

The room was quiet again.

But it was a different kind of quiet now. Lighter. Like something that had been sealed shut for a very long time had finally been opened, and the air inside had been let out.

‘You have been through a lot,” I whispered.

‘No.’ He shook his head gently. “You had it worse. And I made it so much harder than it needed to

1. I’m sorry for that.”

I looked at him for a moment and then shook my head. There was nothing left to assign blame to. We had both been carrying pieces of the same broken thing for three years, each of us alone, each of us thinking we understood what had happened.

We had both been wrong.

I stood up.

I stretched my arms open and looked at him.

‘Do you want to share a big, tight hug?” I asked. “We really need it.”

He looked at my open arms, and something in his face shifted – soft and unguarded and so unlike the Norman White that the rest of the world saw that it made my chest ache.

He smiled and nodded and stood up and walked into my arms.

I wrapped mine around him, and he wrapped his around me, and we held each other properly, tightly, the way two people hold each other when they are not performing comfort but actually giving it. I felt him exhale against my shoulder – long and slow and deep, like he had been holding his breath for three years and had only just now been told he could stop.

I pressed my eyes shut.

After a long moment we pulled back slightly, just enough to see each other’s faces, arms still loosely

around each other.

“How did you know that was exactly what I needed?” he asked.

I laughed softly. “I know you too well, Norman.” I tilted my head. “We were married, remember?” A small pause. I shrugged lightly. “Even if the marriage didn’t exactly last.”

He smiled.

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tsuuled back.

And then neither of us moved.

We stood there, holding each other in the quiet afternoot, light of my sitting room, close enough that I could see every detail of his face the tiredness around his eyes that hadn’t been there three years ago, the lines that grief and illness and time had added quietly, and the way he was looking at me like I was something he had spent a long time being afraid he would never see up close again.

My heart was beating very fast.

His was too. I could feel it.

‘Can I kiss you?”

His voice came out low and careful, like the question mattered and he knew it did.

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