Chapter 3

A few days later, the inevitable happened. David found me in the home library, where I was reading a medical journal. He had that familiar, earnest look on his face, the one he always wore when he was about to ask me to solve a problem his parents had created. It was a painful echo of the past.

"Sarah," he started, his voice low and conspiratorial. "We need to talk about Dad."

"What about him?" I asked, not looking up from my reading.

"The diagnosis. He's not taking it seriously. He's eating whatever he wants. Mom just lets him. You're a dietitian, you know how dangerous this is. We have to do something."

From the living room, Richard's voice boomed, "I can hear you whispering! Stop talking about me like I'm an invalid!"

David flinched. I turned a page.

"He's a grown man, David," I said calmly. "He was in the room with the doctor. He heard the same words you did. He's making his own choices."

David looked stunned. This was not the response he was used to. He expected me to jump into action, to produce color-coded meal plans and exercise charts. He expected me to take on the burden.

"But... it's his health! He could die!"

"Yes, he could," I agreed.

The coldness in my voice finally registered. He stared at me, a confused frown creasing his handsome face. "What's gotten into you, Sarah? Don't you care?"

A memory, sharp and vivid, flashed through my mind. It was from my first life, about a year after the diagnosis. I had spent an entire day creating a beautiful, low-glycemic birthday cake for him, using expensive almond flour and monk fruit sweetener. It was a masterpiece of nutritional science.

Richard took one look at it, his face contorting in a sneer. "What is this garbage?"

Before I could explain, he picked up the plate and hurled it against the dining room wall. The cake splattered everywhere.

"I want a real cake! With sugar! And frosting! Are you trying to poison me on my own birthday, you gold-digging leech?"

I stood there, covered in bits of my carefully crafted cake, my heart pounding with humiliation. I looked at David, pleading with my eyes for him to say something, to defend me. He just stood there, his hands in his pockets, looking at the floor. Later, he told me I "shouldn't have provoked" his father.

That memory was a shield against David's pleading eyes now.

Another memory surfaced, even darker. Richard, in a rage over his blood sugar readings, had thrown a crystal glass. It hadn't hit me, but it shattered on the wall right next to my head, sending splinters of glass into my hair. I could still feel the phantom sting on my cheek. David had rushed over, not to me, but to his father. "Dad, calm down, it's okay."

He never once asked if I was alright.

Those weren't isolated incidents. They were the pattern. The early signs of a dysfunctional system that I had been too desperate for their approval to see. His passivity, Eleanor's enabling, Richard's tyranny. It was a three-headed beast, and in my last life, I had willingly walked into its den.

"Care?" I finally answered, my voice devoid of emotion. "I cared for years, David. I cared so much it killed me."

He recoiled as if I had slapped him. Of course, he didn't understand. To him, my death was still a distant, impossible future. To me, it was a fresh memory.

"What are you talking about?" he stammered.

I closed my journal. "I'm talking about the fact that I am done fighting battles that aren't mine. Your father has made his choice. You and your mother are supporting that choice. My only role in this is to stay out of the way."

I walked out of the library, leaving him standing there in stunned silence. As I passed the living room, I saw Richard on the sofa. Eleanor was spoon-feeding him a bowl of chocolate pudding, cooing at him as if he were a toddler. He was loving the attention.

I felt nothing. No anger, no sadness. Just the cold, clear peace of a decision well made.