I don’t know how much later it was until Shane opened the door. “I got her into bed in the guest room, and everybody else went home. Dana, they said if you need anything, to call any one of them.” Shane sat down on the other side of me and put her arm around my shoulders. “It’s okay.”

“How is it okay?” I asked, still crying myself. Jenny squeezed my hand and said she was going to go see if there was anything Alice needed, and then she’d clean up the house for me.

“She’s just having a hard time right now,” Shane said softly. “She had a little breakdown, but it’s nothing major, and she’ll be okay. She’s just stressing out a little because the novel she’s working on focuses on cancer again, but this time it’s fiction and the lady dies. It’s not about the two of you, but it made all that stuff run through her head anyway.”

“Jesus,” I whispered, wishing I’d been able to persuade Alice to talk to me about this stuff before. No wonder she’d been so withdrawn lately.

“She doesn’t know how to deal with you having gotten better, Dana. She’s happy. We all are. But she had to prepare herself in case you didn’t make it, and this book is bringing that all back for her.” I nodded automatically to what Shane was telling me, even if it was all a little much for me to understand. “It’s important that she gets through it, but she doesn’t want you to see her this way because she wants you to stay well. And she feels that if you’re constantly worrying about her, you might let your own health go.”

“I would never do that!” I said sharply. Shane sighed and gave me a lopsided hug.

“I know, but that’s why she didn’t want to tell you,” Shane replied. “It’s okay now, she got it out of her system and that’s what she needed. She’ll have to start going to her therapist a little more often until she’s okay to talk about it with you. That’s what she and I were talking about in there.”

I nodded, still sort of on autopilot. “I need to hold her,” I said finally. Shane smiled at me.

“I’ll go see if she’s ready to come in here,” she said as she got off the bed, giving me a kiss on the top of my head. A few minutes later, without a word between us, Alice slid into bed with me. She was asleep the second her head was on my shoulder. I knew Shane and Jenny would lock up when they left, so I smiled my thanks at them.

I heard them from the living room as I started to drift off to sleep. “We really have to watch her, I don’t think she’s aware of how bad this is,” Jenny said. Shane mumbled something in reply that I couldn’t quite hear, but I just snuggled closer to Alice and tried to go to sleep.

**********

I woke up with a start. I’d heard Jenny and Shane in the living room, all right, but it was forty years since that night in my memory, and I was the one who was sick again. I listened, but didn’t hear anything more, so I figured they’d gone to bed. I sighed and turned over, trying to find a more comfortable position for my aching body so I could get some sleep.