When we first got serious, to the meet-the-family stage, I spent an afternoon with Nadia’s mom. She told me a story about Nadia, when she was five, or maybe six. Very young. Precocious, serious even then. I could see it, little Nadia with her black hair in a thick braid, a pink ribbon tied at the end of it. She’d be wearing tiny shiny black Mary-Janes and white stockings, plaid skirt, white button-down—she went to a private Catholic school. Anyway. Nadia, young and serious, refused to go to school one particular day. Her daddy was sick. He claimed it was the flu, just under the weather, I’ll be all right in a day or two, baby girl, just go to school. Nadia was no dummy. She knew. Daddy wasn’t just sick, he was Sick. She saw it.

She categorically refused to go to school. No amount of threats of punishment or bribery could convince her. She had to take care of her daddy. And she did. A day, then a week. Then it was a month. She would give him his medicine, she would do her five-year-old dead level best to make him food, make him eat, spooning soup into his mouth and, being five, getting as much on them both as in his mouth.

“I let her,” Nadia’s mother had said, tearing up. “I shouldn’t have, she was too young, I knew it then and I know it now, but…she just had to do it. I couldn’t stop her. You know how she is, how once she’s set on something, there’s no stopping her. I knew then it was who she was—a nurturer, a caretaker. She takes care of people. If you’ll let her, if you don’t stop her, she’ll take care of you, until there’s nothing left of her. Nothing left of her for her.”

She had stared me in the eyes. Taken my face in her hands. “You can’t let her do that, Adrian. If you love her, you have to make sure she takes care of herself. If she gets a whiff of you being sick, she’ll drop her entire life, her entire existence to take care of you. She won’t sleep, won’t eat, won’t rest, won’t do anything but care for you until you’re better. It’s…well, honestly, it’s compulsive, with her. I hesitate to say obsessive, but that’s pretty near the truth of it.”

So, you see. I have to take care of her. If she knew I was sick, she would quit her job, she would baby me and sit at my side for every round of chemo and every experimental treatment, and she’d do her best to take the burden of my sickness on herself, and I just can’t put that on her.

I hate lying to her.

Hate it.