Healing Haven - Book 2 in Haven Series [Complete]

31| Karma

Shifting the car into park a few feet from Eva's driveway, Alyssa leaned back against the headrest and had a good, hard cry. Shedding all her grief and frustration into a torrid flood of tears until her hiccoughing sobs eased into silence. God, that couldn't have hurt anymore had she taken a knife and plunged it straight through her chest.

The look on his face...and because more tears wanted to spill, she pressed her hands to her eyes and willed them to stop. No more. No more crying. What was done was done and eventually he'd thank her for it. Definitely not today or tomorrow, but some day—someday he would see that what she did had been with his best interests at heart.

Because she loved him too much to be selfish.

I'm not your ex-fiancé. I won't bail on you because times get tough. His words rang around her like a ghostly echo of his heartbroken anger. No, he wasn't Sebastian, but even having said that, her ex hadn't been a bad guy. Sure, he'd broken her when he'd called off the wedding and left her the way he did, but when faced with something as profound as one's mortality...could she blame him for wanting to save himself?

To distance himself from that nightmare?

Alyssa remembered in the early days, when Sebastian had come with her to chemo, ashen and severe, he'd held her hand and all the while looked like he was about to be as sick as she was. A couple visits later, she'd forgotten which but she'd only just sat down when something had gone terribly wrong with one of the other patients. She remembered the flurry of doctors and nurses as they flocked in to carry the patient off and behind a curtain where Alyssa caught glimpses and flashes of the woman's convulsing body.

She'd practically turned purple.

After that point Sebastian made excuses why he couldn't come with her to chemo. Work was too busy. There was this errand or that one to run. Only a few weeks after Alyssa got the 'all clear' Sebastian came to her, tears in his eyes and bags packed.

I can't handle this. I'm sorry. Please don't hate me.

For hours Alyssa had sat there, hollow. Numb. Shaken to the root of her very being. She'd faced death and lived, yet he couldn't handle it? But as the weeks bled into months she realized hating him was unfair.

How could she ask someone she loved to watch her go through all of that and more? To carry on with work and life, knowing the pain she'd experience yet be unable to stop it? To sit there while knowing how much she suffered? To smile while cancer ripped their lives apart?

Til Death Do Us Part sounded incredibly romantic until you really took into consideration what those words met when cancer became your reality.

The weight loss, fatigue and mouth and throat sores. The numbness in the hands and feet. The swelling—there was so much more than losing your hair and puking into a toilet. The disease not only ravaged the body, mind and soul, but it broke apart relationships—rotting them straight to the core.

There was always a possibility she would live a full and healthy life—that the cancer would never resurface and Alyssa certainly didn't expect to live the rest of her life alone. But as of right now, only two years into remission, the odds were stacked and she wasn't going to gamble with Ethan's future.

She needed time to heal, time to put back all the broken pieces of her life before she brought someone else into it. The thing that had frustrated her most after finishing chemo was how long her body had taken to recover from the debilitating fog of 'chemo-brain'. The lapses in her memory as well as the inability to focus were arguably two of the most frustrating and troubling side effects for a woman managing a demanding career.