⸻
“So you decided lying to me for a week was the better option,” I said.
“I know it wasn’t,” Sienna said. “I panicked. Uncle Roy offered to drive me, and it just seemed easier than figuring out how to ask you the right way.”
⸻
Roy, standing quietly near the window through most of this, finally spoke. “I should have called you myself, Paige. I let Sienna talk me into keeping it quiet, telling myself it was just until Gordon figured out how to have the harder conversation with you. That’s on me as much as anyone.”
⸻
I sat with all of it for a long moment, the anger I’d been carrying since Thursday afternoon slowly reshaping itself into something considerably more complicated once I understood the full picture.
⸻
“How much time does he actually have?” I asked, looking at Roy instead of Gordon, needing the answer from someone who wasn’t trying to manage my reaction to it.
⸻
“The doctors said weeks, not months, as of last week’s scan,” Roy said quietly. “Could be sooner.”
⸻
I looked at Gordon, three years of careful, cordial distance between us suddenly feeling like an enormous waste of time neither of us actually had the luxury of anymore.
⸻
“You should have called me,” I said. “The day you got the diagnosis. I would have found a way to make this easier for both of you, Gordon. I’m still her mother. I’m still the person who has to help her carry whatever happens next.”
⸻
“I know,” Gordon said. “I think I was ashamed, honestly. Of needing help from you, of all people, after everything I put you through before the divorce.”
⸻
“That’s not a good enough reason to let our daughter skip an entire week of school and lie to me every single morning,” I said.
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
⸻
We spent the next hour working out something considerably more sustainable than sneaking around in Roy’s truck every morning — a modified visitation schedule that let Sienna see Gordon after school and on weekends, with the school fully informed and supportive once I explained the situation to the counselor directly.
⸻
Sienna made up her missed assignments over the following two weeks, Mrs. Carter working with her privately once she understood exactly what had actually been happening instead of simple teenage rebellion.
⸻
Gordon passed away five weeks later, on a Tuesday morning, Sienna and I both there in the room with him, along with Roy, the four of us finally handling something honestly together instead of managing it carefully around each other’s feelings.
