Georgia
She almost told him on a Tuesday, three weeks after the diagnosis, in his kitchen, while he stood at the stove making the one dinner he knew how to cook well, humming something tuneless under his breath.
“I was thinking,” he said, not turning around, “we should take a trip next spring. There’s a place up north Marcus keeps talking about. Good fishing, quiet, nothing fancy. We could take a week.”
Next spring.
She stood in the doorway and watched his back, the easy set of his shoulders as he stirred, without a single doubt that spring would arrive and they would both be standing inside it. She knew exactly what would happen if she told him the truth.
He would stay. She had watched him show up with soup for a cold. She had watched him retreat, instantly and completely, the one time she invoked their old rules. Told that the woman he loved had six months, he would not consider leaving. He would rearrange his whole life around her illness without a second’s hesitation.
And that was precisely the problem.
She had spent a year furious at Benjamin for making decisions about her life without ever asking what she wanted. Telling Axel now would be the same thing in reverse: taking the future where he kept loving a whole, uncomplicated Georgia, and replacing it, without his consent, with the only one she had left to offer him — watching her die, out of a duty he’d never agreed to.
She did not think this was a kindness. She knew it would cost her more than it saved him. She was choosing, with her eyes open, to spend some of her remaining time in exile from the person she most wanted to spend it with, because she had to believe that letting him keep his whole future was the last real gift she had left to give.
“Georgia?” He’d turned around, finally, catching her expression. “You okay? You went quiet.”
“Fine,” she said, and heard how easily the old lie came back. “Just tired. I think I should head home tonight.”
“You sure? You can stay.”
“I’m sure,” she said, and crossed the kitchen to kiss him goodbye, longer than she meant to.
She left before dinner was finished cooking. She sat in her car outside his house for a long time before she drove away, watching the kitchen window, the shape of him moving inside it, humming, and she made herself memorize it: the exact color of the light in that window, the tilt of his shoulders.