Page 94 of The Hookup Plan

“Abdominal,” Drew answered.

“Was it pancreatic? Gastric?”

“Primary…”

“Primary peritoneal,” she finished for him. She winced. “It’s rare. And it can be aggressive.”

“It is and it was,” Drew said. He took a couple of steps back and perched against his mom’s craft table. “It all happened pretty quickly. The fact that she kept it from me for months didn’t help. I could have gotten her better care earlier if I’d known she was sick.” Drew shook his head as disgust welled up in his throat. “No. I’m putting the blame on her, when it belongs here.” He pointed to his chest.

London dropped her head back and sighed up at the ceiling. “I’m going to regret asking this question, because I justknowyour answer is going to piss me off.” She leveled him with an irritated look. “Why areyouto blame for your mother’s cancer?”

“I don’t blame myself for her cancer. I know I’m not the reason she got sick. But if I had been here, if I’d visited more often and paid attention to more than just my work, I would’ve known something was wrong. I was too caught up in my own bullshit to even notice that she wasn’t herself when we had our Sunday phone calls.”

His words hung heavy in the stagnant air. Several long, excruciating moments drifted by before London said, “Have you gotten it all off your chest, or is there more?”

“For a physician, you can be just a little too blunt, you know that?”

“First of all, I’m a surgeon, and we’re notorious for not having the best bedside manner. I, however, have an excellent bedside manner when it comes to my patients.” She held her hands up. “And I apologize for being blunt, because I get it, Drew. I do. I’m the queen of holding stuff in until I just erupt and spread my word vomit all over the place.”

“That’s graphic,” he said. “Is that what I just did?”

“Pretty much,” she said. “And I would tell you that nothing about your mother’s illness was your fault, but based on your tone it’s obvious that you’ve already convinced yourself that you’re the world’s worst son.”

“Pretty much,” he said, echoing her words.

London closed the distance between them and covered his cheeks with her palms.

“You are not,” she said. “You have a demanding career, and you were a thousand miles away.”

She was trying to soothe him, and she was doing a damn good job. But he didn’t deserve coddling—not even London’s somewhat bristly brand of it.

“I purposely stayed away, even though I knew I should have visited more often. By the time I found out about her cancer, it was too late.”

“You purposely didn’t visit your mother? Did you two get into a fight or something?”

“No, nothing like that. Never that.” He hunched his shoulder. “I hated Texas and didn’t like coming here.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What do you have against Texas? Texas is great—at least Austin is.”

Drew shook his head. He started to speak, then stopped, because he honestly wasn’t sure how to explain something that had never made much sense to him.

“I was jealous of it. It borders on absurd, but that’s the only way I can describe my aversion to this place.”

“You were jealous of a state?” she asked slowly, a fair amount of disbelief in her voice.

“Yeah.” He laughed, but none of this was funny. “Did you know I went to fourteen different schools before we moved to Austin?” London’s eyes went wide. Drew nodded. “Fourteen schools, from kindergarten through the eleventh grade. Five different states, nine different cities.” He opened his legs a bit wider to make room for her.

“That’s a lot of change for a kid to go through,” she said, stepping into the space he’d created.

“It was, but no matter where we were, I knew that I was the central thing in my mom’s world. Those places we lived in, they were just locations. Nothing special. It was no big deal for her to pick up and leave, because as long as she had me, she had everything she needed.

“And then we landed in Texas.” He gnawed on the inside of his lip for a moment. “I don’t know what it was about this place that she found so enchanting, but it captured a piece of her heart unlike anything I’d ever seen. I don’t like to think that I was so selfish that I didn’t want to share my mom with anyone, even a place—”

“But didn’t she raise your uncle? You shared her with him, didn’t you?”

“She did, which is why E and I are more like brothers than uncle and nephew.”

“Yet you were upset that your mom finally found a place that she loved enough to put down roots?”