“I’m so scared, Hailey,” Grant admitted. “I am so scared that I’m going to die before I have a chance to prove that I’m different now. I’m equally grateful and ashamed that someone like you could fall in love with someone like me. I told you the truth; I can tell you all of it. That’s the only time I ever almost killed anybody, but there were other bad decisions. There are plenty of reasons for you to dislike me, but I need time…I want time to give you more reasons to love me.”
Hailey smiled as she let go of Grant. “I brought something,” she said, taking off her backpack for the first time. She reached into the front pocket and lifted Grant’s chin with her finger. She pulled out a red, permanent marker and held it in front of his face. “I thought it was about time we changed that,” she gestured to the wall.
Grant smiled through his tears.
Hailey sat on her knees as she pulled the top off the marker. Grant felt the smell of the Sharpie overpowering him, but he was determined to ignore the way it made him feel. Hailey glanced back at Grant and then turned to the wall. When she was done, she put the top back on the marker and backed away to admire her work.
“I LOVE GRANT COHEN,” Grant read. Hailey had crossed out HATE with a big, red X, and the result showed the beautiful progression of their once rocky, now rock- solid relationship.
Grant reached for the marker. “Hey, what are you doing?” Hailey laughed.
Grant opened the marker, and Hailey watched curiously as he worked. Tears came to her eyes. “I LOVE HAILEY NELSON,” she read softly.
Grant nodded as he reached for Hailey’s hands. They were both on their knees, their tree house wall creating a perfect backdrop behind them. “Now, no matter what happens to me…no matter what the doctors say or what the Leukemia does, you can come to your secret spot and remember this moment and how much we loved each other.”
A tearful nod was Hailey’s reply. She threw her arms around Grant’s neck, and, as they began to kiss, a mixture of their tears, some happy, others sad, fell onto their lips.
“Oh my goodness!” Hailey exclaimed, suddenly backing out of the kiss. She began laughing, tears running down her cheek. “We have to go home! Everyone is looking for you! I promised them I would find you!”
“You found me,” Grant nodded.
“Yeah, I did,” Hailey recalled fondly. “My heart told me that approaching the camp loner was the right thing to do. So, I’m trusting my heart again right now when it tells me that the new you is going to impact more lives than you can imagine.”
“As in, my death will serve a greater purpose?” Grant rolled his eyes.
Hailey summoned a strength buried deep inside of her. “Look at our wall,” she pointed. She smiled broadly. “One day,” she smiled radiantly as she unconsciously tossed a strand of curls over her shoulder, “I want you to edit your drawing just like I had to change mine.” She held up her hands like a camera as she took a mental snapshot. One day, that wall is going to say, “I LOVE HAILEY NELSON COHEN.”
Just then, a board creaked, and Grant and Hailey latched on to one another. They laughed as Hailey scurried for the exit.
“This is my fault,” Grant quipped, making light of the weight he had put on as a result of his medication. “I think it is safe to say that I now exceed the weight limit for this feeble structure.”
“Shut-up and get out of there!” Hailey laughed as she climbed down the ladder.
She watched as Grant climbed to the ground to join her. When Grant turned to face her, Hailey’s giggling stopped cold. “Grant,” she gulped. “You are so pale; let’s sit down.”
“Hailey,” Grant moaned as he reached for her. “I feel really weak all of a sudden.”
Hailey helped secure Grant’s arm around her shoulders.
Grant tried to speak. “Hailey…” he repeated a few times, each repetition weaker than the last.
Hailey felt his weight heavy against her. “Grant, don’t pass out…” she begged.
“Hailey,” Grant groaned. Then, his voice breathy, he managed, “I’m sorry.”
The words cut through Hailey as she tried to process them. She opened her mouth, a quick retort on the tip of her tongue, but she stopped herself. As she helped Grant walk back toward the house, she thought about everything he had told her. She thought about that boy she had never known and wondered how someone so full of promise could ever have felt so insufficient. She wondered where Grant would be today if he had never come to Hope Hull. She knew where she would be; she would have been preparing to graduate, nervous about moving to Knoxville and excited about starting basketball practice at the Division I college of her dreams. She still wouldn’t have any idea what she wanted to study in college or what she wanted to do with her life when her time on the court was up. She wouldn’t know what it was like to be someone’s girlfriend, to love someone the way she could only imagine loving Grant.
Hailey swallowed hard. She also wouldn’t be dreading her high school graduation, knowing she would receive her diploma while the boy she loved waited back home, in a more sterile environment, away from the crowd gathered at the high school. She wouldn’t be questioning the next step in her education because Knoxville had been the predestined next step, an entire world away from Boston and the life she never would have dreamed of tackling on her own. She wouldn’t know what it was like to face losing someone whose name was permanently engraved on her heart. She wouldn’t know the agony of lying awake at night praying that tonight wouldn’t be the night God revealed that the future she and Grant envisioned for themselves was not to be.
If she had known what the following spring held, Hailey wondered if she would have made all the same decisions the previous summer. If she had known Grant would get sick, would she have let herself fall in love with him? She didn’t know the answer to that question; she was a different person then; Grant was a different person then, and the possibility that any twist of fate could have kept them apart shook her. She glanced over at Grant, his face pale and wearing the effects of his medication, and she let a tear run down her cheek.
She had loved that face when it belonged to a healthy, handsome, blond whose future was composed of a five-year-plan, a ten-year-plan and ambitions of a career in politics. The face she looking into now belonged to a sunken-eyed, cancer-stricken, chubby boy with no hair and a day-to-day lease on anything resembling a future.
Hailey had never doubted that what she felt for Grant was real; she had never needed confirmation that she loved him, so she dismissed any comparison of his current state to his former self. Loving him even now didn’t make her a good person; her compassion and devotion, as she saw it, were not things to be revered. He was her Grant…then and now. He was her first love; he was the love of her life, and her life was better for having known him…no matter what happened.
Keeping a bag packed and ready to go to the hospital at a moment’s notice had become routine. Grant was admitted again, and, that night, Randy sat next to his bed, watching his son receive the treatments his body required.
“You know,” Grant groaned groggily. “Sam Grant died of cancer.”
“Don’t say that, Buddy,” Randy shook his head.
“It’s a fact,” Grant shrugged.
“I guess it is,” Randy agreed.
Grant closed his eyes and was instantly asleep.
“Poor kid,” Randy sighed.
Granny Miller held a platter piled with chocolate chip cookies, as she peered through her glasses at Nora and Randy.
“Thanks, Mama, but I’m not hungry,” Nora shook her head.
“Hogwash,” Granny insisted. “When was the last time you ate?”
Nora thought back and was a little shocked to realize that she couldn’t remember. “I’m just not hungry,” she shook her head.
