That year, they spend Thanksgiving in a hospital room with nearly stale turkey sandwiches and the relief that Bryony's last-minute surgery had been a success. Bryony lies in her hospital bed, mourning for the loss of her breasts but rejoices for the loss of the tumor that took them from her, and the brightening hope that she will live to see Griffin's two front teeth grow in after all.
Tim sits beside her bed with little breaks, and Griffin spends his time blowing up doctor gloves and making them into hand turkey's. He makes enough of them to name each glove after their turkey's back at home, and Bryony laughs and laughs and laughs while she allows herself to feel a kind of hope she never let herself feel since the doctor told her she had breast cancer. Tim's rough hand in hers seems less like a lifeline now, and more like a casual touch that still gives her the same rush in her head that she felt in high school with him.
The rest of the Hoover family comes to visit her in small groups, broken up by stubborn nurses that say she can't have more than five people in her room at a time; and even that number is pushing it. But Bryony is happy to see them all, and Tim is able to keep up more conversation with them since her diagnosis which just shows how far his relief goes, and Griffin spends time with his closest cousin Brenda Lee, playing with his blown up glove turkeys.
Bryony is kept in the hospital another week to monitor her health, and when the cancer doesn't spread further and the doctors' find no remnants of tumor left inside her breast tissue, they let her go home with her family cancer free.
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Free Me (bxb)
General FictionGriffin knew exactly who he could and could not be from the time he was in middle school. He could not be the boy that looked at other boys with engrossed attraction, no, that was meant for the pretty girls in his school only. He would not be that g...
