Great. Now she was comparing me to that bastard. Why did it always come down to this? “Emilia, you can have other children, when you are healthy again.”

“If chemo doesn’t destroy my fertility like it could. This might be my only chance.”

I clenched my teeth. “This is no chance, for you or a baby. If the cancer becomes metastatic during the pregnancy, then it’s all over and that child has no mother to grow up with.”

“He’d have a father,” she said.

I blew out a tight breath and looked away. After a minute I shook my head. “Please tell me you aren’t seriously considering this—”

“I’m saying I have a choice and I need to think about—”

“No!” I nearly shouted, causing her to jump. Then I cleared my throat and took a breath to calm the fuck down. “No, there is nothing to think about. There is the choice of life or death.”

“No, it’s life or life. My life or the baby’s life. And terminating the pregnancy does not guarantee I’ll be healthy anyway.”

I ran my hand into my hair, curling my fingers so that it pulled at the roots. I would have happily yanked it out if doing so could solve this issue. I shot up off the couch, bubbling over with restless energy. I started pacing, like I was thinking through a programming snarl or working out a development issue, my mind racing over every eventuality.

In every one of them except Emilia getting the abortion, I saw her dying. Either next year or five years from now.

She watched me, her eyes glued to my every movement. “I don’t expect you to understand—”

I shook my head furiously. “No. No, I don’t understand. It’s like you’re giving up. Like you don’t give a shit about your own life.” I stopped and faced her. “Well, what about my life? What about what this does to me if you have the kid and then you die?”

She took in a shaky breath. “Don’t take over for me. Don’t railroad my decisions, my fight, my struggle. This is partly the reason I didn’t tell you in the first place. Because I knew how this would be. You’d step in—you’d ‘handle’ it. It’s my life—”

“It’s our life, Emilia. But you haven’t ever wanted to think of anything as us. Ever. That’s been our problem all along.”

She shot up from her seat, her face flushed with anger. “I was thinking about you, Adam. I was. Don’t you pull that shit on me. Who’s the one who flipped out when you thought I was going to Hopkins? Were you thinking about ‘us’ then or yourself? What about when you hired that PI to stalk me and tell you everything? Or going through my bag. Or—fuck does it ever end? So don’t you dare pull that ‘I’m the only one thinking about us.’ Because I call absolute bullshit on that!”

During her tirade, her pale features had grown flushed. I opened my mouth to respond but she waved me off with a cutting gesture.

“You don’t understand. You could never understand. You refuse to understand. I have life and death growing inside my body right now. I choose life.” She turned and left the room.

I stood, stunned, watching her go. She disappeared into her room and I could hear her rifling through the drawers in her dresser. I knew what that meant. I burst through her door when her backpack was half-packed.

“Oh, no you fucking don’t,” I said, upending the backpack and emptying it onto the bed. “You are not running away again.”

“Stop it! I need to get away and clear my head. I’m going up to Anza for a couple days.”

“Does that mean you are going to talk to your mom?”

She glanced at me as she grabbed fistfuls of her things and shoved them back in her bag. “She’s staying over with Peter this weekend. They were trying to convince me to go out to dinner with them tonight. She won’t be in Anza.”

“So you are going up there all alone?”

She raised her brow. “I’m a big girl.”

“You had better have your ass in that doctor’s office on Monday morning.”

“Or?”

“Or I’ll come get you and drag you there.”

She frowned, shaking her head. “This isn’t one of those problems you solve by pulling out your wallet, writing your check, or where you puzzle it out with your think tank. There is no one right answer and you think you can force your answer down my throat. This is why I couldn’t trust you.”

That sucker punch that Heath had thrown into my gut an hour before? Yeah, that hurt less than her words had. This is why I couldn’t trust you.