Chapter 3 - The Secret in the Study
Sarah didn't stay long. She couldn't. The hollow shell of her home was waiting for her, and she needed to make funeral arrangements for her only son. When her minivan finally pulled away from the curb, the silence that fell over our street was suffocating.
Jane didn't look at me. She simply turned around and walked back inside the house, leaving the front door wide open.
I stood alone among the hundred roses for several minutes. The sweet, heavy scent of petals filled the night air, mocking the ugly pettiness that had lived inside my mind just half an hour ago. Every single flower was a monument to a dying boy’s gratitude, and I had looked at them and seen an illicit affair. I picked up Toby's card from the floor, folded it carefully, and slipped it into my jacket pocket right against my heart.
When I stepped inside, the living room was dark. The only illumination came from the sliver of light spilling out from beneath the door of Jane's small home office—a room she had kept locked for the past two months under the pretense of storing standardized testing materials.
I approached the door softly. I didn't knock. I just gently pushed the brass handle down. The latch clicked, and the door swung inward.
Jane was sitting on the floor in the corner, her knees pulled tightly to her chest. Spread out around her on the hardwood floor were dozens of colorful folders, laminated worksheets, handmade paper crowns, and finger-painted drawings. On the wall above her desk was a massive corkboard covered in photographs.
I stepped into the room and looked closely at the board. There were pictures of bald children grinning broadly with fake plastic mustaches. Pictures of Jane wearing sterile hospital gowns and surgical masks, sitting cross-legged on linoleum floors while reading Charlotte's Web. And right in the center was a framed photo of a little boy with bright blue eyes, wearing an oversized astronaut helmet, giving a triumphant double thumbs-up to the camera.
Toby.
""Jane,"" I said, sinking down to my knees beside her on the cold floor. ""Why did you lock this door? Why did you hide all of this from me?""
She kept her head buried in her knees, her shoulders shaking with silent, rhythmic sobs. ""Because I knew what you would say.""
""What would I have said?""
""You would have told me to stop,"" she choked out, lifting her tear-streaked face. ""You would have told me it was unhealthy. You would have told me that I was getting too attached, that getting emotionally invested in terminally ill children would break me. And you would have been right, Mark! Look at me! I am completely broken!""
May you like
Her voice cracked on the final word, echoing off the bare walls of the small room.
""I couldn't stop,"" she sobbed, clutching a laminated worksheet titled Toby's Space Mission. ""Every single adult in that hospital looked at those kids with pity. The doctors looked at them like lab results and survival statistics. Their parents were paralyzed with terror. They needed someone who looked at them like they had a tomorrow. Even if tomorrow was only twenty-four hours away, they deserved to do spelling tests and draw dinosaurs. They deserved to be kids!""
