Snow Is the Second Teardrop of a Lie

At noon, Hilary came home to cook for me, the same as always. It was a habit he'd held to for years. No matter how busy he was, he made sure to eat with me. Today he'd made beef stew, my old favorite. I lifted a bite with my chopsticks and tasted nothing. After the meal he counted two small white tablets from the pill box and set them in my palm. "Pat, time for your medicine." I took them and swallowed them down with warm water. Something metallic and sweet rose in my throat. I turned my head and coughed twice, and blood, bright red, seeped out between my fingers. Just then, the phone on the table buzzed. Samantha had sent a voice message. It played out loud. "Mr. Delgado, I can't get this quarter's data report to balance no matter what I try..." Hilary glanced at me without thinking, his brow drawn tight, the impatience showing through. "Get some rest. I need to go handle something at the office." He didn't even wait for me to answer. He grabbed his coat and rushed out, the door slamming behind him. I curled up alone on the cold sofa and sat there without moving until the sky went dark. Today was my follow-up. Hilary had forgotten long ago. I took a taxi to the hospital alone. The doctor looked at the scans and let out a heavy sigh. "Ms. Cooley, the cancer has spread everywhere. The time you have left... you need to prepare yourself." As I walked out through the hospital doors, my feed refreshed. It was a grid of photos Samantha had posted. The caption read: 【Move went smoothly! Thanks to a certain someone for treating me to a big dinner to celebrate~】 In the pictures, Hilary was carefully picking the bones out of a fish, laying the meat into the bowl of the girl beaming across from him. Just then, my mother called. "Pat, how did the check-up go today?" "It went fine." "Didn't Hilary say a while back he'd take you around the world? Mom still remembers him saying he'd take you to Iceland to see the northern lights, to Switzerland to ski. He said you'd leave once your birthday came. Have you two booked the flights and hotels yet?" Listening to my mother's worried voice on the other end, I finally couldn't hold it back. My voice broke as I spoke. "Hilary... he's fallen in love with someone else..." I hung up, and the heavy December snow of Ashford came down all over my head. Looking at the vast white of it, I remembered how, every time we went out before, Hilary would put a scarf, gloves, a hat on me one by one, saying, "You've been afraid of the cold since you were little. If you catch a chill you'll ache all night and won't sleep, and I can't stand that." A snowflake landed on my lashes. I blinked once, and it melted into water and ran down. The truth was, ever since I found out Samantha existed, a ridiculous thought had even started to grow in me. Why did I have to find out at all? If I hadn't, then until the day I died, Hilary would always have stayed the boy who took my hand at fifteen. Always the one who, even after I slapped him, still smiled and said, "It's okay." Always the one who kept watch at my bedside for three days and three nights, holding my hand, saying he was afraid of me leaving. I could have carried that illusion and died in peace. But I found out anyway. Hilary had gone from that warm, ardent boy into the hateful traitor he was now.

My hair started falling out in clumps, and the pain in my bones was so bad I couldn't close my eyes. Hilary thought I was asleep. Every night he sat out on the balcony gaming on a voice call with Samantha, and her laughter drifted in, sharp and grating. That noon, Samantha used delivering company files as her excuse to come by. The moment she stepped inside, she made a slow circle through the living room in her high heels. "This place is so cozy. No wonder Mr. Delgado never wants to go back to the office. I didn't realize home was such a nice little haven for him." I ignored her. When she reached the coffee table, she let out an "Oh no," and knocked my pill box clean over. The last few cancer pills rolled out across the floor. She scrambled to pick them up, all flustered hands, and crushed several of them underfoot. "I'm so sorry, so sorry, I didn't mean to..." Hearing the commotion, Hilary strode over, frowning. "What happened?" Samantha ducked behind him, all startled little doe. "I knocked over her medicine by accident... Mr. Delgado, did I cause a lot of trouble?" Hilary glanced at the crushed powder on the floor. His voice didn't so much as ripple. "Broken things mean good luck. Just buy more." Back when he tore through every drugstore in the city for me, he probably never imagined that one day he'd stand in front of the same person and, about pills another woman had knocked over, say "just buy more." Things had changed after all. That evening. The savage pain triggered acute hemorrhaging. I collapsed onto the cold floor, my mind slipping away. Using the last of my strength to dial 911, I pressed Hilary's number with a trembling hand. I wanted to hear him do what he'd always done, every time I curled up in pain, cupping my hand in his palm and saying, "Don't be scared, Pat. I'm here." The phone rang a long time before it was answered. Samantha's coy laugh came through. "Mr. Delgado's busy winning me a stuffed toy! If you need something, I can pass it along for you!" Behind her, the cheerful music of an amusement park played on. The phone slid from my palm, and the world went dark. When I woke, I was in a hospital, Hilary sitting by the bed, his shirt still stained with cotton candy from the amusement park. I opened my eyes in a haze, and out of some old reflex, the way I did every time I got sick, I reached to hold his hand. My fingertips had barely touched his cuff before he shook me off. "Why did you do that to Samantha? The video online, did you post it?" Lying there in the hospital bed, all I felt was how absurd it was. Absurd that I'd come so far from the girl I'd been at fifteen and still hadn't learned that the man in front of me had stopped being someone who would hold my hand a long time ago. When I said nothing, Hilary shoved his phone screen right up to my face, his voice edged with anger. "She's a young girl with no one to lean on in this city. I was already making arrangements to send her away. Why would you still do something like this?" In the video, my mother had rushed down to the street outside Hilary's office. Facing Samantha, who'd just gotten off work, she raised her hand and slapped her in front of everyone, then cursed her with red-rimmed eyes. "You shameless homewrecker, going after another woman's boyfriend!" Samantha had been branded "the other woman," the thread stacking up to thousands of replies. Hilary drew a deep breath, his voice shaking a little. "Do you have any idea? Samantha nearly jumped off a building." "I didn't post the video..." I explained, my voice barely a thread. Before the words were even out, Hilary's phone rang again. He glanced at the name on the screen, didn't spare me another look, and tossed out one line. "You'd better sit here and think about what you've done. Stop stirring up trouble." Then he turned and slammed the door on his way out.

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.