“We’re out of milk. Could I borrow some?” She should probably at least say please, if not actually grovel, but she just couldn’t while he had that smug expression on his face.
He paused for a moment. “Sure,” he said and invited her in.
If Michelle had bothered to imagine what a single, successful hockey player would do with his place, she would have pictured this condo. The leather furniture was tan instead of black, and the place wasn’t as messy as she might have guessed, but she would wager he had someone come in to clean for him, and that it had been done recently. The big TV, gaming console and sound system, the modern furniture, it was all right out of Single Guy with Money designs.
She followed him into the kitchen, which was sleek and modern—and mostly unused, she suspected. While he opened the fridge, she pulled her shirt from her sticky torso. She’d have to take another quick shower. Reflexively, she pulled her necklace out from under her shirt as he turned to her with one of those ridiculous bags of milk in his large hands.
“Wedding ring?” Troy asked as he eyed her twisting the golden band that hung from her necklace.
Michelle followed his gaze and realized what she’d been doing. She tended to play with the ring when stressed. Before Mitch died, when she’d worn it on her finger, she’d twisted it around and around when she was upset. After he died, she’d moved it onto a necklace around her neck, but the instinct was still there.
It wasn’t hard to figure out why she was stressed at that moment. Three people were starting school today, and she was going to have to start her own preparations all over while trying to get them out the door on time. That would count as stress.
But Troy had paused, waiting for an answer. “Yes,” she said, taking a step closer to the milk and escape.
“Divorce?” he continued, passing the bag of milk toward her eager hands.
She shook her head. When he didn’t let the milk go, she sighed, frustrated. “I’m a widow.”
Surprised, he released his grip. She grabbed the needed bag and pivoted to leave.
“Cancer?” he asked. It was an interesting guess, but not unreasonable. Still, Michelle was not getting into their story with a man who was basically a stranger. They were trying to escape the past in Toronto, not drag it along with them.
She glanced over her shoulder as she headed for the door. “Sorry, long story, and I have to shower again and get the kids to school. Thank you for the milk.”
She left, aware she was in his debt. She’d have to deal with that. She didn’t accept charity. She stood on her own, and didn’t plan to let her neighbor think otherwise.
* * *
TROY WATCHED MICHELLE LEAVE. The milk-drenched T-shirt had given him a pretty vivid picture of her shape. He’d tried to remember she was someone’s mom, but he wasn’t blind. And she’d obviously taken a good look at him, so turn about was fair play.
But once she’d said she was a widow, those thoughts had fled.
A presumably young man could die from many causes. But he’d done the research on this during those dark days, and outside of accidents, suicide and murder, cancer was the top cause of death for young men.
He did his best to avoid dwelling on thoughts about cancer. He had a clean bill of health now. He’d beaten it. But every story the papers ran about him now mentioned the reason he’d missed last season. Every reporter wanted to know how he felt about it, if he was over it, if he could return to where and what he’d been.
Of course he said he’d beaten it. Of course he said he was the same player he’d always been; cancer hadn’t changed him. He wanted to believe it, so that was what he told everyone.
He couldn’t play his game if anyone thought he was soft or weak in any way. So he acted tough, and joked about beating everyone on the ice the way he’d beaten this disease. He never spoke about those black nights. When the doctors had first said the C word.
He hadn’t thought he was really sick. Just a minor urinary tract infection. The doctors would give him some antibiotics, and then he’d be fine. But it wasn’t an infection. It was prostate cancer. There was something in his body that wanted to kill him.
It took a while to get his mind around that. So he’d acquiesced to the advice of his doctors to wait and evaluate how things progressed. He’d tried chemo and radiation, before everyone had finally agreed that surgery was the answer. In hindsight, he’d have been smarter to just have the surgery at the very beginning. The various courses of treatment had meant that he’d missed a whole season before he had a clear bill of health.
During that year—a long, difficult year he did his best to forget—there had been too many nights when he’d woken up in a panic, unable to sleep while Death lay stretched out in the bed beside him.
He was mostly over that now, but there were still nights when he’d wake up, sure he could feel the cancer in his body again, killing him from the inside. The doctors believed they’d caught it all, that it hadn’t metastasized and spread elsewhere. It was worth losing his prostate for that. But there were no guarantees. Michelle’s comment about her husband only reminded him of that.
After she left he pulled out his phone and called down to the concierge and asked for the name of his new neighbor. He gave it, and Troy typed “Michelle Robertson” into the search bar of his browser. He added “army” and “widow” to narrow the results down.
He wanted to know why her husband had died. He realized she might not be happy about it, but he was willing to push some boundaries when it came to the big C. He needed to know if it was cancer, and if it was the same kind that he’d had.
Prostate cancer was rare in young men, but Troy knew only too well that didn’t mean younger men couldn’t get it. He wanted the cause to be anything else, so that Troy’s own odds were better.
It took a bit of searching, but he found out the answer. And it was anything but what he’d expected.
“IT’LL BE GREAT,” Michelle said, ruffling Tommy’s hair. The look on his face told her that he didn’t believe her, but knew she had to say it anyway. She wanted to hug him, but he was too old now for such displays of affection in front of others. So she watched him file into the school with a pang.
Michelle and the kids hadn’t arrived at school with the additional time she’d hoped for, but they hadn’t been late. The kids were nervous. Angie got more talkative when she was unsure of herself, while Tommy grew even quieter. Michelle was nervous, too, mostly for her kids. Angie was outgoing, and likely to make friends. Tommy had always been shy, with a smaller circle of friends than his sister, but that was even more the case since his father’s death. He wouldn’t make the first steps to reach out to someone, and her heart ached to force the other boys to be kind to him.
She waved the kids off and then, once they’d disappeared into the school, she headed for the nearest subway entrance.
She hadn’t had a chance to familiarize herself with her route to class the way she’d have liked to do. Subways were new to her, since they only had buses back in the ’Peg. Fortunately, the Toronto Transit System was mostly one loop south and north, and one main line east and west. She had to listen carefully to the garbled transit announcements and watch the map closely, but she made her way to school without mishap.
She then followed the instructions she’d carefully printed out to get to her classes.
She’d enrolled in a one-year bookkeeping program. She didn’t have an avid interest in numbers, but math had been one of her better subjects, and her years in the Forces hadn’t provided her with many marketable skills outside the army. Bookkeeping seemed manageable