The Sweetest Devotion

𝐈𝐗.

I decided to be brave.

There was a reason beyond my anger I wasn't facing my father. I was scared. When my father first began experiencing symptoms of ALS, I felt powerless. For my whole life we'd had enough money to just throw at our problems and make them disappear. This wasn't one of those times.

    One minute he was this big, powerful man standing at six-three. A man who went on jogs, hunting trips, and ran his business with a kindness you didn't see often in the world of money and capitalism. And the next, he started losing coordination, having issues gripping his pens, holding his eating utensils, and tripping over himself.

    It took nine long agonizing months for them to reach their diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. That was three months ago.

    My father was faring as best as he could—or as well he could compose himself around us. My mother had loved him for her whole life. This was a shock to her entire system. She wasn't ready to face the outcome of a life without my father.

    And neither was I.

    I was rightfully angry about my forced engagement and marriage, but I loved my father and couldn't stomach never speaking to him during what remained of his time here. Because there was a clock ticking away. No one survived ALS. There wasn't a cure. Some lived three to five years, others ten, and some even twenty. My fingers were crossed for twenty.

    Friday afternoon a courier had arrived at my suite with a bouquet of white roses and a card from Cain. A very short note of Go see him. – C. Carter was all that was written. I wasn't too sure how I felt about Cain, but it wasn't lost on me that he was right in my needing to see my father.

    So, Saturday morning I got myself together and drove over to my parents' house. The groundskeeper was tending to the lawn outside, the smooth buzzing of a lawnmower could be heard as soon as I got out of my Lexus. The scent of fresh cut grass permeated the air, mixing well with the fragrance of my father's nearby tulip garden.

    Inside, I caught my family's housekeeper, Priscilla, heading down the hall with a basket of laundry.

    Everyone was moving, going here and there as they'd always done, making the scene of the Nichols estate appear so normal.

    It was when I found myself outside of my father's bedroom that it all came crashing down on my shoulders. The conjoined weight of my anger and fear. The uncertainty of my future hung in the balance and I hated having no control over any of this.

    With a deep breath, I knocked a couple of times on the door before inviting myself in. Lying back as comfortably as possible in his four-poster bed, my father was wearing silk pajamas. Something so out of the ordinary for a man of his position. Usually, he was up by five on the dot to start his day.

    The curtains were drawn, allowing light into the room as he lie back watching something on the large TV mounted on the wall across the room. There was an empty chair beside his bed, probably belonging to my mother.