Dying to Live

Chapter 30

⏳ ZOE, July

July 13th was Adam's 36th birthday and while everybody was smiling and laughing, it truly was a bittersweet moment. Nobody said anything, but we all knew it. This was going to be his last birthday. It might even be the last time he was surrounded by his entire family. Every moment from now on could very well be his last.

But that meant we had to make them count. There would be no tears today. 

We only went home for a few days after our trip to North Carolina. Life didn't have a whole lot of time to resume before we packed up the car and left to visit his parents in West Virginia. Everybody was there, even Melissa and Imogen.

"How is he doing?" Melissa asked me the first chance we got alone together. She stood close to me and spoke in a hushed voice as we stood around the table with plates of food in our hands.

My gaze fell on the man sitting on the side of the pool with his legs moving up and down in the water. He was talking, laughing, joking around like he always did. Just looking at him now, you wouldn't be able to tell he'd just spent four days in the hospital battling a chest infection. Most people would probably think he looked better now than he did a few days ago.

I looked back at his sister but I didn't have to say a single word. She could read my expression like an open book. Without wasting another moment, she wrapped her arm around me and pulled me to her side.

"At least he looks happy," she muttered.

"He loves it when everyone's together like this," I told her.

We watched with smiles on our faces as Beckett swam to the edge of the pool and asked Adam to come in and play volleyball with him and his dad. Calvin looked like he was about to tell Beckett off, but Adam just shook his head and hoisted himself down into the water.

"I think it makes him feel like things are a bit normal for a while," I continued.

"Yeah, it was like that the first time too," Melissa smiled wryly. "He's a stubborn ass, my brother, isn't he? Even when he was throwing his guts up, he still wanted to do everything and make the least amount of waves in everybody else's lives. I was planning my wedding at the time and he still helped as much as he could. He was my best man—or man of honor, whatever you wanna call it... When he sat us down after Christmas and told us the cancer was back..." she trailed off and bit down on her lower lip.

"He didn't make it sound like it was so bad. He beat it once, so I just assumed—" she shrugged and made a face. "Even when the word 'terminal' started getting thrown around... I still thought there was hope. People live with terminal cancer for years. Imogen's aunt had end stage ovarian cancer and she lived five years when her doctors said she probably wouldn't last six months."

"Some people beat the odds," I nodded.

"But he won't," she murmured.

"No, I don't think so," I replied.

He had a few more tests done with his oncologist after we got back home from North Carolina, confirming our suspicions. The cancer was still growing. There were new tumors scattered across the old surgical scars and remaining lymph nodes, and they were steadily moving upward to his neck. He said he was beginning to lose sensation in some places, and his hearing was a little wonky in his right ear. The one positive thing was that at this moment, the cancer hadn't reached his other major organs. But then, tumors were appearing on scans so rapidly, things could change very drastically in just a few short weeks. All there was left for us to do now was to wait and see, and help manage the symptoms the best we could as they came.