Dr. Sheffield is quiet for a few seconds. “Next week, Sienna. You need to get in here next week. Which of these spots should I hold for you?”

  I growl low in my throat but hope she can’t hear me. “Friday,” I say, because maybe Uncle Rich could help out over the weekend.

  “Okay, I can hold that spot through Monday, but you’ll have to call the scheduler to confirm it and submit your insurance information. Do you have the number for the scheduling office?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What is it?”

  Uh.

  Dr. Sheffield sighs, and the edges of her tone soften. “Have you talked to anyone about this, Sienna? Do your friends and family members know? I can only assume you haven’t told your father, but have you told your husband? Anyone?”

  I say nothing. I think back to that appointment in her office when she told me that this was too heavy to carry alone. It’s also too heavy to share. “There’s a lot going on,” I say in an attempt to explain, but the words sound stupid and I know it. My hand moves to my breast, where the monster lives. I see myself the way Dr. Sheffield does. Scared and young and not taking this as seriously as I should. I press the spot where I know the lump is—I find it every time I shower as though I’m hoping it will feel smaller. It’s like a tiny seed—millet or quinoa but not precisely round—just hanging out in there. I can’t feel it now through my shirt and bra, but I know it’s there. Ticking like a clock? Rubbing its hands together like a cartoon villain in hopes I’ll continue to put this off so it can explode into the rest of me? I think of Larry Shriver again, and his cane and his son who will have his dad in the audience when he graduates from Lusk High School but won’t have his dad when he graduates college. What if Larry could have caught his cancer before it spread? Wouldn’t he have done anything to have had that chance?

  “Keeping this to yourself will not make it go away,” Dr. Sheffield continues. “If you would rather, I can tell your family for you.”

  My chest prickles at the thought of handing my phone to Dad and saying, “This is the doctor who diagnosed my cancer. She wants to talk to you.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” There seems to be a subtle threat in Dr. Sheffield’s offer—she has Dad’s number and permission to contact him on my behalf.

  “Then tell them yourself. Let them give you advice and encouragement.”

  “I need to get things set up so that I can leave, but I’ll call and confirm on Monday.”

  “I’m going to text you the scheduling department’s number as soon as we finish this call.” Her voice is picking up speed, as though she’s afraid I’ll hang up. “It’s a simple outpatient procedure and will take only an hour or so. A cancer foundation we work with will cover up to two nights at a local hotel for patients who live more than fifty miles away from the center. You’ll need someone to drive you to and from the center—do you understand?”

  “Yeah.” I could take Uber to and from the . . . wait, am I doing this? The image of cancer cells floating around my body, waiting to be caught in the current of veins and arteries that will take them to the rest of me, is powerful. And probable.

  In the springtime when the cottonwoods open, the fluffy seeds look like snow. Big clumps of the stuff will build up against fences and walls. If someone accidentally leaves the barn door open on a windy day, the stuff blows in and it’s hell to get out because it gets in all the nooks and crannies. That’s how this feels—cotton in the wind, out of my control. Can’t be caught and stuffed back into the pods it came out of.

  “Sienna?”

  I blink quickly. “I-I’m here.”

  “Call first thing Monday. Let me help to save your life. Please.”

  “I’ll call,” I say.

  I hang up and stare at the tile floor. I’d helped Dad lay it about eight years ago. It’s pretty good, for a couple of novices who watched a few YouTube videos and decided it wasn’t rocket science. We’re used to doing things ourselves—I can’t remember the last repairman we called. We don’t care if the hinges in the kitchen match or the pipes chug when we turn on the outside hose. I used to see that independence as something we did together, but is it the same part of me that’s trying to do this by myself?

  I want to go back to bed. I want to cry. I want to run away and pretend none of this is happening.

  When my phone rings in my hand, I jump, concluding that it’s Dr. Sheffield having forgotten to tell me something. I’m irritated all over again as I raise the phone to answer it. But it’s not Dr. Sheffield. It’s Tyson. Again.

  Dr. Sheffield’s worn me down and I’ve run out of irritation or excuses. What’s worse than the call I just got off? I might as well get it over with.

  “Hi, Tyson,” I say into the phone, leaning against the tub and feeling exhausted even though it’s not even nine o’clock in the morning.

  He pauses, as though surprised I answered. “Hi,” he finally responds.

  We both sit there, and I think back to that wedding picture in the living room. Those kids could never have imagined that they would be on opposite ends of a phone call on opposite sides of the world and not know how to start a conversation.

  After a few seconds, he clears his throat. “So, I’ve gotten a bunch of e-mails from the insurance company over the last few days. Looks like things are pretty bad.”

  My eyes drift closed and my chin falls to my chest. So much for secrets.

  10

  Sienna

  I do my best to minimize the situation as I tell him about the lump and going to Cheyenne and the diagnosis as though I’m updating him about beef prices as of last month. It’s the first time I’ve put words to everything that’s happened, but I can’t tell if I’m relieved or made more anxious by hearing it all out loud. His listening is interspersed with “Oh, Sienna,” and “Wow” and what could be called gasps, but that’s not very masculine so I don’t categorize them that way. I’m tempted to give in to the obvious emotion of what I’m saying, but I don’t. That would be inviting him in, and even amid all this I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be fair.

  “How is your dad handling this?”

  I’m quiet long enough that I hear him let out a breath—definitely an exasperated sigh rather than a gasp.

  “You haven’t told him?”

  “I can’t,” I say, and explain how Dad’s still recovering and it’ll be too much and he’ll want to come with me and we need him at the ranch. The coincidence of having committed to the lumpectomy right before Ty’s call is uncanny. That I can talk to him as easily as this is equally strange. I guess his having been my confidant for so many years is a hard habit to break.

  “Isn’t hiding all this a whole lot harder than telling him? I mean, he’s gonna know eventually and then he’ll know you didn’t tell him.”

  I must be feeling brave today. “There are other reasons I don’t want to tell Dad—stuff I’m trying to make sense of.” I pause like a golfer watching in absolute stillness as her ball rolls across the green.

  “Stuff?”

  I haven’t talked to Ty in three months and haven’t shared details of my life in longer than that. It’s his distance from all of this that makes him a good confidant. So I tell him about the pictures, the files, Dad evading my questions. I realize how very conspiracy theory it all sounds and expect Tyson to try to convince me to tell Dad. He doesn’t. “So, anyway, it’s all twisted up together. I can’t bring Dad into this when there are these unanswered questions but I can’t put off this lumpectomy any longer either.”

  I wait for him to tell me that it will be impossible to keep this from my dad and I’m going to have to find some way to tell him. “What about Beck? Can you talk to her?”

  “If I tell Beck she’ll tell her mom, and Dad will find out and . . . I’m just not ready to lose control of it that way.”

  “She might not tell.”

  “But she probably will, and Clint’s been down with his ankle, and there’s just so much on her plate already.”

  “You really think you can go have surgery without help?’

  I tell him about the hotel room the nonprofit pays for and Uber and . . . boy, does it sound stupid. But it’s all I’ve got. I brace to defend myself against whatever he says next.

  “I could come help out.”

  For a few seconds I’m confused, thinking he means that he can come out and help with the ranch. Then I realize he’s not talking about calving, he’s talking about the procedure. It confuses me. I’m tempted to explain that this whole cancer thing is going to pass—98 percent of women survive it—but surviving this won’t fix him and me. In fact, it will make the hard things harder between us because who knows where I’ll be in the whole infertility continuum when all of this is done. “You’re in London, Tyson.”

  “I can get a week off.”

  I laugh because this has to be a joke. “Take a week off just like that and fly to the other side of the world?” I couldn’t get him to take an afternoon off back in Chicago—even after work at home he was taking calls and sending documents. That was before he’d said he wanted to take this London job and have us put the baby-making on hold.

  “They’ve offered me an extension of my contract,” Tyson says. “If I accept the extension, I’m sure I can put a week off into the deal. They really like me here.”

  The initial offer to go to London had come last summer. The implantation had failed two weeks earlier. I was back at work but went to bed as soon as I got home each day. “They’ve asked me to transfer to London for a year, and I’m thinking it might be exactly what we need. You can get stable, we can have some adventures, and I can add a nice credential to my résumé.” I didn’t want adventures, and I didn’t care about credentials. I wanted a baby, and the last two years of my life had been so devoted to that goal that nothing else mattered. I didn’t like city living, never mind a cosmopolitan city like London. Tyson had assured me it would be one year—just one.

  “When were you going to tell me?” I say this as though he owes me personal updates, which he doesn’t. He’s been wanting me to come to London from the start, almost didn’t go when Dad got sick and I ran back to the ranch last October, a month before he was supposed to leave. I assured him I’d join him after Christmas and that he might as well be in London if I would be in Wyoming during that time anyway. But I didn’t go to London after Christmas, and he was mad—accused me of planning it from the start. Of giving up on us. I texted him that I was sorry he felt that way. Then didn’t respond to his follow-up texts for almost a week.

  “The offer came on your birthday, and ever since then I’ve been trying to figure out how to get us to a place where we can talk about it.”

  I guess this was that place.

  “And I guess you want to take the extension,” I say, my tone flat. Am I disappointed? Relieved? Both? Neither?

  “Can you think of any reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “Would you be coming back here because you think we can fix us?”

  “No, it’s so that when we look back on this time, neither of us can hate me.”

  We’re both quiet, but I feel something let go inside me. When we look back. But not together. This is his peace offering, and it’s all I can do not to accept it too enthusiastically.

  “So, I guess my cancer showed up just in time, then. You get to swoop in and be the hero and kick the dust off your shoes when you finish up.”

  I expect him to be offended, but he’s very calm when he speaks next. “Do you want me to come or don’t you? I’m not trying to be a hero. I haven’t been able to save you for a really long time. But I can help if you need it, and it sounds like you need it. I want more than this, Sienna. I want to meet new people with different stories and work toward a future I can be excited about. I don’t see how you and I are going to build that when you’re never going to come to London and I’m never going back to Lusk.”

  A wave of envy takes me off guard. A future to be excited about. New people. Different stories. I wonder if new people includes a new woman—someone whom he walks through Hyde Park with and reads Harry Potter out loud to. I take a few beats to poke around in my heart and head to see how I feel. I should be angry and grieving and maybe even beg him to give me another chance, but what I feel instead is relief. Not a waterfall of it. Not a fall-onto-my-knees-and-kiss-the-floor kind of relief, just the gentle “it is what it is” sort of feeling that I used to feel after getting a bad hook in a roping competition. The way I felt when I stopped doing rodeo because I knew I had no future in it. Without Tyson’s wagon hitched to mine, there will be one less person to feel responsible for failing.

  I lean my head back against the tub and close my eyes. “You want a divorce?”

  He pauses, lets out a breath. I imagine him sitting on the window seat of the London flat that came with the job—he’d sent me pictures after he first arrived. The window looks over the financial district, and at night the view is beautiful. He’ll be dressed in tailored trousers and a button-up shirt with the top few buttons undone. He’s probably bought half a dozen new pairs of shoes since arriving there—he loves nice shoes. That image is the Tyson I have watched him moving toward for years without realizing it was happening. Through all the hard stuff, I turned inside myself and he reached outside, grabbing ideas and experiences, and now he was on his way to finding a different happiness. “We’ll get your stuff out of the way first, but I think we’re both worn out. These last months have been hell, Sienna.”

  “These last years have been hell,” I say, and open my eyes. Things were good until we started trying to have a baby, but it’s been downhill since then. It’s not hard to see that what we loved most about each other is what the other person could give us. When we couldn’t give each other those things, the foundation rotted out. He needed to succeed with something, and I didn’t care. About anything. Do I even love him anymore? Maybe the fact that I want him to be happy even if it’s without me means that I do love him. Or maybe the fact that I can so easily see the end of our road means that I don’t.

  “We could meet with a divorce lawyer while you’re here,” I say.

  “Uh, let’s just deal with your stuff. We can do the rest of it later.”

  “But you’ll be here. We could get a lot done and save—” I feel an eagerness to do something. Anything.

  “Stop it, Sienna,” Tyson says. “I hadn’t planned on saying anything about that stuff. I just didn’t want you to think I was coming for some kind of reconciliation, that’s all. I need to talk to my office and make sure this will work, but I’ll let you know as soon as I have things in place, okay? When is the procedure—next Friday?”

  “Yeah, they want me to confirm on Monday that I’ll be there.” I pause and take a breath. “You’ll really come out here to help me with this?”

  “I still care about you, Sienna, and this . . . this is shitty. I want to help, and I’m pretty sure I can pull it off.”

  “Okay,” I say, staring at the tile floor again. It’s almost romantic, his running to my aid, but romance isn’t enough. Heroics aren’t enough. Wanting something different isn’t enough. Like he said, we’re both worn out. I need to get this surgery and work out the stuff about Dad and Mom. He needs to work toward an exciting future in London. “Thanks for doing this, Tyson.”

  He pauses, lets out a breath. “You’re welcome.”

  11

  Sienna

  Dad looks at me across the table Tuesday morning, a turkey sausage link speared on his fork and paused halfway to his mouth. He lowers it and blinks. “You’re going out of town now?”

  “I know the timing isn’t great,” I say, peppering my eggs and not looking at him. My stomach is in knots. “But I called Manny, and he’s able to come back early with a cousin of his in tow, and the heifers are doing great.” The calving had started Sunday. We have eight baby cows so far.

  Manny has helped us on the ranch here and there for ten years, but he works the orange groves in Florida for the winters. It had been a gamble whether he could accommodate coming to us a month early, but it seems his contract there only had a week left and he was able to make adjustments. He’ll be here tomorrow morning and stay through the September stock sales. His cousin can stay only until his position in Montana is ready for him next month, but the two of them will make up for my being gone. If I still believed in fate, I would think all this was meant to be. But accepting Manny’s availability as a blessing means having to see something of value in the cancer and my marriage ending and my dad’s evasions. I can’t follow the line that far.

  “We’ve still got, what, twenty heifers and then the seventy cows that need to deliver?” Dad asks, not doing a very good job of hiding his concern about my leaving.

  Twenty-three heifers and sixty-two cows, I correct in my mind but don’t say out loud. “It’s probably my last chance to make this thing with Tyson work, Dad. He’s coming from London.”

  He continues to look at me, and I don’t break eye contact even though I’m terrified he can see the lies twisting me up inside. Telling Tyson about the cancer makes it feel more possible to tell Dad, but at the very least he’ll be upset I didn’t tell him sooner and want to come with me. Dad can’t work the herd much, but he’s a priceless resource for Manny and the new hand. We both can’t leave the ranch this time of year, and I can’t really address all the Mom stuff until the cancer is out of the way. My secrets need to stay secrets a little bit longer just like his do.

  “Do you want this thing with Tyson to work, honey? I’ve kind of gotten the impression that you aren’t missing him too much.”

  I trail my fork through the puddle of syrup on my plate, the grooves filling almost immediately. “I don’t know what I want to happen with Tyson, but I feel like I need this time with him right now. Maybe it will push me over the fence and I can finally move on.” More lies—I’m clearer on where I stand with my husband than I have been in a very long time, though. I keep thinking of him with a lovely English rose who has an unblemished past and a bright future. I want that for him. Tyson has become part of that other life, the fantasy one. I’ve scheduled a meeting with a divorce attorney in Cheyenne before my preoperative appointment on Thursday. I haven’t told Tyson, because he’ll insist on not doing it, but why not kill two birds with one stone? Divorce and lumpectomy, bing, bam, boom.