Chapter 4

The online pile-on kept getting worse.

Someone dug up that Samantha Winfield was an intern at Hilary's company, and the posts calling her a girl who'd slept her way up stacked thousands deep.

To put the whole thing to rest for good, and to protect her.

That night, Hilary posted.

The photo attached showed him and Samantha side by side at the amusement park, both smiling.

【She's my girlfriend. Please stop the online harassment. Don't hurt an innocent person.】

The tide underneath flipped in an instant.

I became the "scheming first wife," and my mother became the "wicked mother-in-law."

Private messages, curses, and doctored photos poured down on us from every direction.

I put together a long post and uploaded all those years of photos of Hilary and me.

The second before I tapped "Send," the door to the room swung open.

A dull thud.

Hilary, who had never bent for anyone, dropped straight to both knees at the side of my bed.

"Pat."

His eyes were red.

"I'm begging you. Delete what you wrote. Don't post it."

I stared at him, unable to believe it, tears breaking loose.

"They're harassing my mother! I'm the one they're smearing! Hilary, what is wrong with you?"

He looked away from me.

"Samantha, she... she's just a girl fresh out of school. She can't take this."

"Pat, if you post that, she's truly finished."

"I'm begging you. Trade her this one time for our twenty years. Please? Give it some time, and I swear I'll make it up to you."

I looked down at him, kneeling there in a wretched heap.

And I suddenly remembered freshman year, when he took a beating in a brawl for me, pinned face-down in the mud and still refusing to bend.

Now he was spending twenty years of childhood love to buy my silence, to turn me into someone who kept her mouth shut.

How ridiculous.

The words nearly came out on their own. "Why?"

"I can't stand to see her suffer."

Can't stand.

Those three words cut in like a knife.

I'd been the one he protected all those years, and in the end I'd become the one he could bring himself to hurt.

I looked at my phone screen, at my mother's photo maliciously doctored into a funeral portrait, viciousness heaped underneath it.

I didn't answer his pleading. I pressed send, once, and meant it.

"Pat Cooley!"

Hilary shot to his feet, his eyes bloodshot.

"Won't you rest until you've destroyed her? When did you turn this cruel?"

He threw the words down and stormed out with red eyes, slamming the door behind him.

The day after the online pile-on.

My mother, her heart set ablaze with rage, suffered a sudden stroke, and closed her eyes forever.

She never even got to see the belated clarification I'd posted.

She didn't know, either, that I'd meant to spend my last three years walking her through all the places she'd wanted to see when she was young.

She said she wanted to watch the sunrise over the lake, to see the snow in Scandinavia, to pray for a string of prayer beads for me in front of the great palace temple.

I hadn't had the chance to tell her I'd already booked it all.

I forced my weak, sick body through every one of my mother's funeral arrangements.

It was the first time I'd done anything without leaning on Hilary. Before, he fed me my medicine, whatever I wanted to eat would be on the table the next day, and even when I got up in the morning he'd cover my eyes before turning on the light...

But of all the things I could first learn to do without him, it was losing the only family I had left in this world.

The night of the wake.

I opened my phone.

Samantha had a new post.

The photo was the two of them in the snow at the foot of Mount Rainier, Hilary standing beside her holding an umbrella over her, smiling gently.

The caption: 【Thank you for helping me through this.】

Just then, an unknown number sent me a video.

In it, my mother sat in the chair across from him, her voice low and pleading.

"Hilary, Pat only has these few years left. I'm begging you... treat her well in her final days..."

By the end her voice was already trembling.

In the video Hilary was silent for a long time. "I have my own difficulties."

I looked at that cold turned back on the screen and laughed, a hollow, desolate sound, tears streaming as I laughed.

The man who once knelt in front of her and said, "For the rest of my life it's only ever Pat," was him.

And the one now watching us be pushed into the depths of despair was him too.

I packed the last of my things and left for the airport.

A message came in from Hilary.

【Pat, Samantha has mild depression from the online harassment. I have to take her away for a while. Once we're back in the country, I promise I'll make it up to you and set everything right.】

I opened my settings and blocked and deleted Hilary's number, his messenger, every way he had of reaching me.

I stood, walked to the security checkpoint, and looked back once at the snow falling over Ashford beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The snow was coming down hard, so hard it looked like it wanted to bury the whole city.

The three years I had left, I would live for my mother, and for myself.