Kimberly’s POV
For more than two weeks after I regained consciousness, Olivia barely left my side.
Her caretaking bordered on obsession–feeding me, helping me to the bathroom, nearly insisting on removing my clothes for me. She’d developed dark circles under her eyes from sleeping in the hospital chair, yet refused all suggestions to go home and rest.
I grew increasingly anxious to recover quickly. At this rate, Olivia was sacrificing her own life to tend to what remained of mine. The guilt was becoming unbearable.
When she finally stepped out to take an important work call, I seized my chance. Swinging my legs carefully over the edge of the bed, I tested my weight against the cold floor. Without support, my walking seemed perfectly fine–wobbly, but manageable. A small victory that made me ridiculously proud.
But after finishing in the bathroom, disaster struck. My legs suddenly betrayed me, buckling without warning. I crashed to the floor with a sickening thud, my temple striking the edge of the sink basin. Blood immediately poured down my face, warm and metallic.
As I struggled to pull myself up using the counter, my trembling hand accidentally snagged the sheet that had been carefully draped over the bathroom mirror–Olivia’s doing, I realized too late. Looking up, I saw a gaunt specter staring back at me. Hollow cheeks, paper–thin skin, and eyes that seemed to sink into dark caverns. The disease had carved away at me until I was barely recognizable.
I wasn’t just dying–I was already half–gone.
Cedric burst through the door, taking in the scene in an instant. Without a word, he pulled me against his chest, positioning his body to block my view of the mirror.
“I go to pay a bill for five goddamn minutes, and where the hell is Olivia?” he growled, anger masking fear. “Completely useless when you actually need her!”
Though too weak to push him away, I summoned enough strength to defend the one person who’d been my constant. “Don’t you dare talk about Olivia like that around me,” I said, my voice thin but determined. “I won’t hear it.”
“She has her own life, family, career. Unlike me, wasting away and creating problems for everyone around me.”
Cedric fell silent, his chest rising and falling against my cheek.
He reached for handfuls of tissues, carefully wiping the blood from my face. I caught his reflection in a fragment of visible mirror–his eyes reddening, jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscle working beneath his skin.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were sick earlier?” he asked, voice strained with forced composure. “What good is your voice if you don’t use it?”
His hands trembled slightly against my skin. “You could have gotten better. Do you understand that, Kimberley? The doctors said… if we’d caught it earlier…” He stopped, unable to continue. “Why did you have to be so stubborn, letting it get this bad!”
I replied with a calmness that surprised even me: “Because I don’t need you.”
Something flickered in his eyes–pain, perhaps, or recognition.
“I don’t need your concern or your company.”
Each word was deliberate, careful.
“So whether you knew about my illness or not was irrelevant to me.”
The truth was, I’d never deliberately hidden anything from Cedric.
My medical reports sat openly on the bedside table where anyone could see them, but he never glanced at them once.
During those months when my body was wasting away, Katie had appeared in his life like a beacon of everything I was rapidly losing–youth, beauty, vitality, time.
for her, Cedric had begun staying away night after night, caught in the gravitational pull of possibilities I could no longer offer.
20.37
Almost in Love with You Before That Cruel Summer Took Frerything
21.20
So he never witnessed me collapsed on the bathroom floor, convulsing in agony. Never heard me sobbing through the night as I begged doctors over the phone to help me. Never saw me staring at bottles of pills, calculating how many it would take to make the pain stop forever.
Cedric lifted me back onto the hospital bed with surprising gentleness. As he leaned over to adjust my pillow, a tear escaped, falling onto my cheek where it mingled with my own.
He turned away quickly, his voice bitter: “Right, Kimberley. You’re so goddamn independent. You dumped me when you wanted to, pushed me away when it suited you.”
He paced the small room, running his hands through his hair. “I know you don’t need me. Message received loud and clear.”
After a long silence, he stopped at the window, his back to me, shoulders slumped in defeat. When he spoke again, his voice had lost all its familiar
steel.
“But I need you,” he whispered, so quietly I almost missed it. “I’ve always needed you.”
The admission hung in the air between us, raw and vulnerable in a way I’d never heard from him before. The mighty Cedric Royce, brought to his knees not by business rivals or financial ruin, but by the impending loss of the woman he’d spent years pretending not to love.
I said nothing, closing my eyes against the weight of what might have been. Pretending to be asleep was easier than acknowledging how much those words still had the power to hurt me.
Chapter 12
Chapter 12
