Beyond the Horizon (The Sons of Templar MC Book 4) by Anne Malcom Page B

mom smiled a sad smile, squeezing my hand. “Yeah, baby. Not the best news I’ve had.”
    I gaped at her, tears welling in my eyes, refusing to believe this. “No, no. They’ve made some kind of mistake. Doctors do that all the time, take out the wrong organ, mix up babies. This is wrong,” I declared firmly.
    My mom was calm. “As much as I admire your distrust of the public system, they are right this time,” she said, her voice light.
    I shook my head, a thousand thoughts dancing around in it. I’d only just arrived home, Mom had called me and asked me to come home for dinner. I had sent her a text two days before, explaining I was going straight back to Tasman Springs, lying about an assignment I needed to get done.
    I’d assumed she wanted to grill me about my night with Asher, as I had been dodging any contact for two days, wallowing in pity, unable to handle having to provide the details I knew Mom would demand. I was bracing, rehearsing it, reopening wounds that hadn’t even begun to heal.
    Instead, she told me this.
    One little word tore through every inch of me.
    I stared in her eyes, the vibrant ice blue ones with little to no wrinkles around them. The only lines that were there were a result of eleven years of happiness, of laughter. The horror that she endured for years before that was nowhere to be seen on her face, those scars lay down somewhere, I knew. Her beautiful blonde hair was yet to be streaked with gray, and she had it bound in a braid to the side of her head. She was wearing her usual array of colors and textures. She didn’t look sick. She looked as she always did.
    “When d-did you f-find this out?” I stuttered, grasping at what this meant.
    She squeezed my hand. “Yesterday,” she told me quietly.
    Yesterday. Razorblades chewed at my stomach. I had been worrying about my own inconsequential self, my mom was facing this news alone. I’d been avoiding contact with her because I couldn’t cope with voicing something that was dwarfed by the news she’d been dealing with.
    I blinked away tears. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered. “I would have come, I would have—”
    “Peanut, I didn’t want you to have to be dragged along to some depressing hospital.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Those places are full of germs anyway. I wouldn’t want you catching something for my sake,” she continued, thinking of anyone but herself, like always.
    “Mom, I would’ve come. I would’ve been there for you,” I declared shakily. “It’s fixable, right? They can fix you?” I continued. My frantic mind clung to the fact that she didn’t look sick, so she couldn’t be that sick. They found it early. They’d fix her.
    She squeezed my hand. “We give this positive thought, and I’m sure the universe will heal me. It wouldn’t be so cruel to take me away without seeing my baby girl set the world on fire,” she replied with a small smile.
    She was wrong.
    The universe was that cruel.
    Cruel enough to plague my mother, the woman who ate only organic, vegetarian, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, with a disease that took everything from her.
    That also took everything from me.
     

     
    I opened the door to the persistent pounding that had penetrated the sound of the loud music playing in the house. Mom was in the studio out back, switched off to the world. She was feeling inspired again, I didn’t want to interrupt her if painting got her through right now, I’d give it to her. I’d been lying on my old bed staring at the ceiling, feeling too numb to cry, or to do anything. I’d been Googling Pancreatic cancer for a while, but the low survival rates and the description had me first running to the bathroom to throw up, then bursting into a fit of tears.
    My mind had been whirling, swimming in the complexities that came with that evil word. Cancer.
    We were going back to the doctors tomorrow. I was meant to go back home today, back to school tomorrow, but there was no