“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Stormi. I’m sorry I’ve been keeping a distance from you two. I didn’t want to have this talk until I knew more, had more answers, and a plan. I just—” Something snapped back in place when he said that.
A plan.
“When’s your next appointment? I’m going to be there.” I needed to talk with his doctor, or doctors, to get a plan together for him so we could get through this. We were going to fight it. All of it. Fighting like never before.
“Tomorrow at nine.”
“Great. My dad was going to watch Stevie anyway while I met with the contractor,” Already planning to have Mom pop in on camera and talk with the contractor, or have him email me a report so I could email back questions I had. I didn’t care. I had to be at that appointment. He nodded.
“You should know, I made my last will and testament. Just in case.” I put my hands over his mouth, having to swallow the bile that rose in my throat at the thought of him being gone.
No. He was going to stay here. With me, with Stevie. With our baby.
“Tomorrow. Tell me tomorrow. Tonight, I need your love, and to tell you something. And we hold each other. I needyou,” I looked him right in the eyes, tears falling down both our cheeks, “Please.”
“Anything,” he kissed me deeply. Not in a rushed, I need you now, kind of way. More in a,I want to savor everything in this momentkind of way. From the way he tasted and the way he felt. To the way his mouth felt on mine and the way he made my body shiver, pulling moans from me that made him get even more excited.
Those were the moments I was lost in for the next hour while we kissed, and touched, and memorized each other, feeling every deep emotion, every single good memory came flooding back to me, everything that turned me on about him, everything I knew I’d never forget. Every inch of skin on each other was worshipped. We would worry about everything else tomorrow. After the doctor’s appointment.
“I love you, Stormi. You are my life. You and Stevie,” he whispered into my hair as he fell asleep.
“And our newest member,” I whispered to him, pressing his hand on my flat stomach. I watched as realization suck in. He pulled me snuggly next to him as I laid my head on his chest, listening to the thump of his heart. Wishing there was a way to record the sound so I could play it at night when he would most likely have to be stuck in the hospital.
God.
It was going to be hard as hell to be away from him. We would need to come up with a good plan, a good support system, good team of doctors who believed in us. With a yawn, one final thought crossed my mind.
Let’s do this.
T W E L V E:
Stormi’s POV
Three years later…
Three years since Sebastian was first diagnosed with colon cancer. It was such a hard thing to grasp at first that he could be taken from me. I was almost certain I would never forget what it felt like to be sitting in the doctor’s office. Praying, even though I wasn’t a religious person at all. I prayed that they would have good news. When this doctor, the sixth one he’d seen and given all his imaging he had brought from all the other doctors, he said it was too big to operate. We talked about time, things he wanted to do, what our options were.
As soon as the words passed his lips,too big to operate,I thought I was going to pass out. I took a deep breath and grabbed Sebastian’s hand. No way was I not showing him I was able to be supportive, even silently, because my words were failing at the moment. Mainly because I had used all my brain power to keep myself alive and breathing. Because I couldn’t speak. I felt like I couldn’t even breathe! He did six months of chemo and twelve rounds of radiation at the same time, to try to shrink it.
That was our only hope. That it would shrink.
He hated everything about that period of his life. Those six months when he was too weak to go to my appointments and his. The same six months during which his hair had started to fall out, and he dropped a ton of weight, and not just because of the chemo. He was so sick from the chemo and radiation that he couldn’t hardly eat anything. Anything he did eat either came back up, or ran right through him.
He never once gave up. When he saw that I was backing him one hundred and ten percent, he pushed. Hard. He was determined to be done with both chemo and radiation before the baby got here, so he could be in the room with me and hold the baby after it was born. Since he wasn’t well enough to come to the anatomy scan, I chose not to find out. It would be a surprise for both of us, and I think he appreciated me not finding out. I think, even though he never said anything, that he would have been incredibly sad if he’d missed that moment when he’d already been beating himself up for missing most of the pregnancy. No matter how much reassurance I gave, he still hated not being able to physically be with me.
Thankfully, two days after our son, Sage, was born, which was the best Christmas gift we could all get, we got the news that his tumor had shrunk small enough to do the surgery! They would go in and remove the tumor and any other parts of his colon that were affected, giving him what we hoped was a temporary colostomy bag.
We both cried happy tears, hugging and thanking whatever higher power was out there. We thanked his doctor and the whole oncology floor. They were amazing, working with the Mother/Baby Unit to get a plan for him to meet our baby if he was still doing the chemo and radiation at the due date.
Here we were, two and a half years later,stillcancer-free! With his diagnosis, he handed over the reins of the company to his CFO, while still holding the majority of the shares, thus making sure that the publishing house still helped smaller, lesser-known writers become published, while not having to run the day-to-day of it.
Stevie was four, going on fourteen. Sage was three, and deep in his three-nager phase. And we were adopting our third child. This little boy had been living with us for about threemonths, practically full-time. He was another little four-year-old, but from Stevie’s Pre-K class named Jettson, but he liked to be called Jett. His story wasn’t shocking. His parents were addicts, and had dropped him off for a weekend at Grandma’s that never seemed to end. It had been two years since he had been living with his grandmother, with no word from her daughter or son-in-law. She was having difficulties getting around as she got older, so after the Halloween parade, where Stevie had held Jett’s hand the whole time, his grandmother asked if we would be willing to adopt him, since Stevie and Jett already get along so well. We agreed to give it a try, to see how he liked coming over after school, and gradually making the visits longer, and soon there were sleepovers, and then he was living with us full time.
The thing was. Before having chemo and radiation, we had decided to put some of Bastian’s baby tadpoles on ice for possible future kids. We had also talked about adopting if I was determined to be done being pregnant and having babies. So, we had been doing both. I was currently the size of a house, because we did a round of IVF days before Stevie came home and told us about Jett and his situation with his grandma. Bastian and I talked. That was going to be our only round of IVF because we were going to focus solely on Jett and get him into a big family.
That single round took hold, and now, I was due any day. We found out, with all three of our kids, that we were having another boy. Stevie would be our only girl, which she was thrilled about. It was finally the long-awaited day to adopt Jett, making everything official. We just couldn’t wait for our boys to be officially part of our family.
And apparently, neither could they.
