Chapter Text
To tell everyone what was happening was, without a doubt, the hardest thing he had ever had to do in his entire life.
How do you tell a mother that her son has cancer? How do you explain to her that, from now on, her days will be divided between hospital walls and chemotherapy sessions? How do you warn siblings that things will never be the same again, that the lightness of their lives had ended that morning?
He glanced at Daphne and thought of his nieces and nephews. How do you explain to a child that your hair is falling out because of an illness without making it sound like a death sentence? How can you have faith in life when everything, absolutely everything, gets complicated out of nowhere and without warning?
He had no answers. None. But he knew that time had run out and that he had to tell the truth before the worst part of the illness came to claim his body.
He took a shaky breath, feeling the oxygen barely reach his lungs, and looked directly at his mother. Violet maintained a soft smile, but a spark of deep concern was already beginning to seep into her eyes as she noticed her son's rigidity.
"There is something Marina and I need to tell you," he began, and the tone of his voice carried none of his usual warmth, freezing the room immediately. "Today's gathering is not for good news. There is no pregnancy, nor are we planning a rushed wedding."
Anthony took a step forward, losing all the joking attitude from just minutes before. His protective instinct flared instantly.
"Colin, you're scaring us," he said, scanning his brother's pale face and Marina's held-back tears. "What is going on?"
He closed his eyes for a brief second, searching for a strength he didn't know he had, and forced himself to release the words that would change the destiny of the Bridgertons forever.
"Yesterday I was handed the results of some medical studies," he let out, with a crudeness that hurt his chest. "I have cancer. And I have to start chemotherapy as soon as possible."
As soon as the words left his mouth, he felt the air in the room turn dense, almost solid, as if the oxygen had evaporated from the parlor. The questions and denials were not long in coming, overlapping each other in a desperate rush to cling to a reality that no longer existed.
His older brothers, always so sure of everything, repeated with altered voices that the diagnosis had to be wrong, that laboratories made mistakes all the time, and that they would look for the best specialists in the country to prove it.
"It has to be a mistake, Colin! Laboratories mess up every day!" Anthony exclaimed, his voice strained and his jaw rigid, striding toward him. "Tomorrow morning the chief of oncology at the central hospital will see you. I will coordinate it myself. We are not staying with the diagnosis of a single doctor."
"Anthony is right," Benedict seconded, though his voice lacked his older brother's confidence; he was pale and held onto the back of an armchair as if he needed balance. "We will have them repeat the tests from scratch. These things... these things fail. You are strong, you look good. It doesn't make sense."
"It's not a paperwork mix-up, Anthony!" Marina intervened, her voice breaking and her eyes filled with tears. "Colin and I were reading about the medical center where he did the studies. They have the best equipment in the country. They don't play around with these things. My God..."
"Please..." Hyacinth whispered. It was the first time in her life he had seen her like this, without a sarcastic comment to make. She hugged her own knees, curled up in her seat. "Colin, tell us something. Don't just stand there in silence."
Seeing his little sister like that left him in shock. But seeing that, at the other end of the room, his mother's face turned pale and tears began to fall was heartbreaking.
"It can't be... Not my son," she repeated between sobs. "My God, how did this happen? Just a few weeks ago we were planning the future and now..."
"Shh, it's okay, breathe," Gregory consoled her in a whisper, though his own eyes shone with moisture as he looked at Colin with deep sadness. "We are in this together, Mom. The family is here, we are all here."
"My God... Colin, what exactly did they tell you? What stage is it?" asked Daphne, who was being held by Simon.
"Don't talk about stages as if it were a movie. Colin is fine, yesterday he was singing karaoke. Tell them you're fine!" Eloise finally spoke.
"Don't overwhelm him," Phillip requested, stepping forward to place a hand on Eloise's shoulder, trying to slow her frantic pace. "I know you are desperate, we all are, but Colin is the one who needs to breathe right now. Let him finish speaking."
At that moment, he saw his sister's attention slowly drift. Eloise turned around, locking her eyes onto her husband.
"You... You already knew," Eloise whispered, with an interrogative voice that was gaining firmness and pain. "That's why you insisted so much that we come today, right?"
He saw Phillip swallow hard, trapped under Eloise's hurt gaze. The truth was out, and the shockwave was only beginning to hit the ones he loved most.
"Phillip didn't say anything because I asked him not to," he intervened, raising his voice enough to appease his sister and divert the blame to where it belonged.
Eloise ignored his words for a second. She kept her gaze locked on her husband, her breathing agitated and her fists clenched at her sides, refusing to accept that the two people she trusted most had hidden something like this from her.
"Since when have you known?" she asked Phillip directly, with a voice that trembled between betrayal and fear.
"This morning," he replied, holding her gaze. Phillip's eyes reflected pain from the memory of the talk in the car, so pained that they disarmed any complaint Eloise could make.
All the rigid defensiveness and indignation vanished at once. The realization that her husband had been supporting her best friend in silence hit her fully. She didn't fight, nor did she reproach. Eloise simply broke down in tears, a choked sob that seemed to come from the deepest part of her chest.
She turned immediately toward Colin and, closing the distance in two strides, threw herself directly into his arms.
That embrace was the trigger that finally tore down the last barrier of distance in the room. He felt how, one by one, the rest of his siblings, brothers-in-law, and sisters-in-law approached in an instinctive movement, surrounding him until they turned the space into a single, solid refuge.
He felt Anthony's firm arms, squeezing him with an almost desperate strength, as if by doing so he could retain the health in his body out of pure willpower. Benedict joined immediately, hiding his face for a second on his shoulder, while Francesca and Daphne surrounded him, weeping in silence.
Even Simon, Michael, and Phillip himself drew close to embrace him, joining their hands in a silent pact of absolute loyalty. None of them let go; it was as if they feared that, upon breaking contact, reality would become even more hostile.
"We are going to get through this, Colin. I swear to God we are going to get through this," Francesca whispered in his ear, with a hoarse voice that admitted no argument. "You are not alone. You are never going to be alone in this."
Amid whispers and choked promises, everyone rushed to assure him that they would be there for him every step of the way, that they would move heaven and earth, and that they would find a way to overcome the illness no matter what it cost.
However, before letting him go, Anthony took him by the shoulders, forcing him to look him squarely in the eyes. Behind him, Kate and Sophie looked at him with pain but nodded firmly.
"But you have to make us a promise, brother," he demanded, with a seriousness that ran through the whole family. "Tomorrow morning we will start moving contacts. You have to promise us that you will keep looking for more diagnoses. We want second, third, and fourth opinions from the best specialists. We are not going to sit idly by with a single piece of paper. Promise it."
He looked at the faces of each of them. He saw the fear in their eyes, but also a fierce determination that returned a trace of the strength he thought he had lost that morning. He looked at Marina, who nodded slightly with misty eyes, and then looked back at his siblings.
"I promise," he replied in a whisper, feeling for the first time that the weight of the illness and uncertainty no longer fell solely on his shoulders.
His mother was the last to approach. She took a step forward, trembling but moved by a strength that only mothers possess in the worst moments. With infinite tenderness, she reached out her hands and touched his face, cradling his cheeks with a warmth that transported him immediately back to his childhood, when she was capable of healing any wound with just a gesture.
Tears kept falling without ceasing from Violet's eyes, furrowing her cheeks, but her gaze did not waver. She held her son's eyes with a fierce determination, ignoring the pain that was splitting her chest to focus all her energy on him.
"Everything is going to be fine, my love..." she whispered in his ear, with a voice that trembled but tried to sound like an absolute decree. "Everything is going to be fine, I assure you. Nothing is going to separate you from me. Nothing."
Hearing those words was like receiving a balm in the middle of the burn he had been dragging since the day before.
She had already lost her husband, she had seen her family falter in the past, and he knew that Violet was not going to allow an illness to tear another piece of her heart away. In that whisper, in the pressure of her hands against his skin, he understood that his mother would fight by his side tooth and nail.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw Marina a bit further back, watching the scene. The weight of the night was still there, the truth was still an inescapable reality that would begin soon, but the atmosphere in the Bridgertons' parlor was no longer one of defeat.
It was the beginning of a truce.
That was how he found himself caught in an exaggerated number of waiting rooms, doctor's offices, and clinical tests, seeking second, third, and even fourth opinions.
But the result did not vary. All the oncologists he visited said exactly the same thing, the diagnosis did not change, and the more time he spent trying to deny it to please his siblings, the more precious time he lost to start the treatment. His family, however, remained closed off, looking for a miracle or a medical error that simply did not exist.
To make matters worse, things with Marina were strange.
His fiancée was acting in an extremely odd manner. Not in a bad way, but since the night they revealed the truth to the family, something in her wasn't right. She had become hypervigilant, obsessed with his every move, keeping tabs on everything he did, what he ate, how he breathed. The excess attention didn't bother him, but he found it deeply disconcerting. He couldn't forget that very morning she had been so distant, putting up a physical barrier in bed, and that as the hours passed she had clung to him again as if that morning rejection had never happened.
He couldn't decipher her. He didn't understand that sharp oscillation between icy distance and suffocating attachment. Or, at least, he didn't understand it until Phillip came to see him to open his eyes to the truth of things.
"Colin, I need to talk to you about something important," his friend said as soon as he opened the door to receive him.
"Phil, what's going on?" he asked him, feeling his stomach drop. The first thing he thought was that something bad had happened to Eloise, his mother, or someone in the family.
"It's about Marina," Phillip stated, looking him squarely in the eyes. "Is she here?"
"No, she's not here, but she'll be here any minute... What do you have to say about her?" he replied, getting defensive instantly. The instinct to protect his fiancée flared by reflex.
"Then I don't have much time," Phillip murmured, thoughtfully, casting a glance toward the street. "I don't know how to start this, and I know you won't believe me at first, Colin. But I am your best friend and I am always going to want the best for you. That's why I brought proof."
"Proof?" he replied, furrowing his brow, completely confused. "Proof of what, Phillip?"
"Marina is cheating on you," he let out without anesthesia, while extending his cell phone with the screen turned on. "They are from this morning."
When he looked down at the device, he felt as if the ground disappeared beneath his feet. He couldn't believe what his eyes were seeing. On the screen, frozen in a series of sharp photographs, was the love of his life in the arms of another man. He didn't know who he was, but seeing her smile at him that way, with a complicity that was supposed to belong only to them, broke his heart into a thousand pieces.
All the confusion of the past few weeks took on a sinister meaning. That sudden suffocating attachment... It wasn't out of fear of losing him, it was fear of being discovered.
He didn't manage to articulate a single word to his friend.
He still had his eyes fixed on the images when the sound of keys in the lock interrupted the heavy silence of the house. The front door opened and Marina walked in with a light step.
"Baby, I'm home!" she shouted from the foyer, leaving her things on the entryway furniture. "You won't believe the traf—"
Her words stopped dead. Marina froze halfway down the hall upon seeing Phillip standing in the living room and, above all, noticing the distraught and ghostly expression he surely had at that moment.
"What... what is going on?" Marina asked with genuine bewilderment, taking a hesitant step back as she noticed the density of the atmosphere.
"That's exactly what I'm asking myself." It wasn't a shout; it was a cold whisper, devoid of all the warmth he had ever had for her.
He stepped forward toward her with a firm pace, followed closely by Phillip, who remained as a silent and protective witness. He lifted his friend's phone, turned the screen toward her, and forced her to look at the harsh reality of her actions.
"What is this, Marina?" he demanded, feeling the last bit of stability in his life crumble before starting the true battle for his health.
"Where did you get this?" Marina asked, her voice shaking but her eyes fixed on the images on the phone.
"That doesn't matter," he attacked, leaving no room for hesitation. "I want an explanation. Now."
"It's not what it looks like..." she tried to stammer, taking a step back.
"Please, don't lie," Phillip interrupted, taking a step forward. "I saw you with my own eyes and you can't deny what is seen in those photos."
"Was it you?" Marina asked, turning toward him with a sudden fury. "For God's sake! What is your obsession with me, Phillip?"
"Please, don't come at me with idiocies and face the truth," Phillip stated, crossing his arms as he saw how she tried to shift the axis of the conversation to play the victim.
He could feel the ground opening beneath his feet. He looked at his fiancée (if he could still call her that) with a disappointment so deep that it prevented him from breathing.
"Leave us alone, Phillip," he requested without taking his eyes off Marina.
"I'll stay close," he replied, giving Marina a look of absolute disgust and his friend one of deep pity before leaving the room.
The sound of the door closing left a heavy silence in the room.
"I'm waiting," he finally spoke. "What is this, Marina?"
"You already know the answer," she answered, and at last her eyes flooded with tears.
"Is that all you're going to say?" he inquired, feeling his own tears ready to overflow.
"You don't know how hard all of this is being for me!" she excused herself, raising her voice in a desperate attempt to justify herself. "You don't know how hard it is to be with someone who is a ticking time bomb and who on top of that pretends everything is fine. You don't know what it's like to plan a future and have everything fall apart. Twice... Tom was the only one who..."
"Tom? Is that his name?" he asked, though the answer changed nothing now.
"Yes. The only thing Tom wanted was to support me at this moment. Things... they just happened."
"They just happened?" he mocked with a bitter laugh that hurt his throat. "How did they happen? Were you talking and out of nowhere you appeared in the motel on 6th Street?"
"You're being unfair, you don't understand..." she tried to victimize herself, taking a step toward him with her hands extended.
"Of course I don't understand!" he shouted, finally losing his composure. The accumulated pain of the last few days exploded in his chest. "I don't understand how you told me that you would always be there for me and that I wasn't alone in this, only to end up cheating on me! You say I don't understand you, but you are the one who understands nothing. I am the ticking time bomb! I am the one going through this! You just want to use my illness to victimize yourself."
"You don't understand me..." she insisted, crying harder.
"No. And that's why it's over," he stated, feeling a sudden and cold clarity. He just wanted her to disappear from his sight. "Everything is over. I want you to get out of my house."
"Colin, please, let's talk," she begged, panic reflected on her face. "You can't do this. We have a history, we can't end it just like that."
"Since when?" he asked, his voice strangely calm, but demanding an answer without further detours. "How long have you been cheating on me, Marina?"
Marina wiped the tears from her cheek roughly, realizing she gained nothing by trying to hide the details.
"Since before," she confessed with a broken voice. "Since before knowing about your illness."
The impact of her words hit him straight in the stomach. So it hadn't been the fear of cancer, nor the shock of the diagnosis that had pushed her into the arms of another. The betrayal was already there, installed in his home long before the medical tests ruined their plans.
"But the night we told your family..." Marina continued, taking a desperate step toward him, "that night I went to see him to end everything. I swear to you, Colin. Seeing your mother, your siblings, understanding what was coming... it made me want to do things right. I wanted to cut off the affair completely. But today... today I saw him again. I couldn't help it."
He looked at her with a mixture of repugnance and deep pity. Marina's logic was twisted: she intended for him to value a single night's attempt at loyalty, as if the fact of having gone to "end things" erased the previous deception or justified that today she had fallen back into the same bed.
"Colin... I love you," she tried to approach once more.
"You should have thought about that before climbing into another man's bed," he answered, letting the tears fall freely. "Get out."
She made no move to leave.
"He said get out," Phillip's voice resonated from the hallway.
"Don't get involved! This is between him and me!" Marina screamed at him, turning with fury.
"Not anymore. Get out," he interrupted, wanting everything to end. "I'll have your things sent to you later."
With one last look, Marina understood that there was no turning back. All the guilt and haughtiness vanished, leaving her defeated. She headed toward the door, but before crossing the threshold and disappearing completely, she stopped and looked at him one last time before closing the door behind her, leaving him in a living room that suddenly felt too big, too cold, and completely empty.
The seven days following the breakup dragged like a heavy chain, transforming the house into a mausoleum. That entire week after the separation was an authentic torture.
Going from projecting an entire life with a person, from seeing her as your absolute refuge, to discovering that everything had been a facade of betrayal, was horrible. The pain of the infidelity mixed with the fear that was already eating away at his body, sinking him into a pit where the days lacked light.
However, in the dynamic of the Bridgertons, time for isolation was a scarce luxury. One week was all his family gave him to suffer or make a drama out of his broken engagement. On the eighth day, Anthony's constant calls and Benedict's silent visits made it clear that the mourning for the ruined courtship was over; there was a much greater urgency knocking at the door.
That week was, without a doubt, the worst week of his life.
Trapped within the walls of his room, he felt that he couldn't keep living, that life no longer made sense. Why fight for a future if the one he had imagined was disintegrated in a motel on 6th Street?
It wasn't until his mother entered his house, ignoring his need to be alone, that everything broke.
The sound of the key turning in the lock arrived muffled, as if it were submerged underwater. He didn't want to open his eyes. For days he preferred the darkness that alcohol gifted rather than facing the weight of being awake.
He heard hesitant steps crossing the threshold and, immediately, the sound of a choked exhalation. He knew perfectly well what the living room stank of: confinement, stale pizza boxes, the perspiration of a week without showering, and the bitter smell of cheap whiskey that had become his only refuge. Immobile on the sofa, he feigned that he was still plunged in a heavy sleep, wishing with all his might that whoever had entered would decide to turn around and leave him alone.
However, the noises did not cease. For what felt like hours, the rustle of plastic bags, the clinking of empty bottles being dragged away, and the constant scrape of a broom against the carpet could be heard. The dense air began to dissipate slowly, replaced by a clean scent that stirred his stomach. He felt a deep pang of humiliation; they were dismantling the bunker in which he had hidden to die of grief.
The sharp tug of a trash bag being tied closed was what broke his resistance. Sitting up slowly, groaning in a low voice from the throbbing pain drilling into his head, he blinked several times until his mother's silhouette gained sharpness in the middle of the living room. Her hair was tied back, the sleeves of her blouse rolled up, and she wore an expression of pain that she tried to mask with firmness.
Instead of moving him, the mixture of the hangover, wounded pride, and depression filled him with a dull rage.
"What are you doing here, Mom?" he asked, slurring his words with a hoarse voice he barely recognized. He ran a hand over his face and felt the itch of a dirty, growing beard. "Nobody asked you to come. and even less to start touching my things. Leave me in peace."
Violet left the trash bag on the floor and turned to look at him face-to-face.
"Someone had to come, Colin, because it is evident that you decided to abandon yourself," she claimed, sweeping her gaze over the dirty clothes and his pitiful appearance. "Look at yourself! Is this your way of facing things? Locking yourself up to drink until you lose consciousness?"
Her words hit him. Standing up awkwardly, swaying a bit on the carpet she had just cleaned, the indignation burned in his chest.
"I have nothing to face!" he shouted, losing his temper and feeling how tears of pure frustration accumulated in his eyes. "Marina made a fool out of me for months! My body is rotting inside and the only person who was supposed to be with me was sleeping with someone else in a motel! I have nothing left, Mom! Let me do whatever I want with the days I have left!"
"I don't allow you to talk about your days as if you were already dead!" she interrupted, raising her voice with an authority he didn't remember. "Marina committed a foolishness, yes, but she is not your life! Your family is your life!"
He could see how his mother's rigidity disintegrated in a second. The mention of death seemed to break the last defense she had left, and tears began to stream from her eyes, thick and desperate. She crossed the distance separating them with a quick step and firmly grabbed his arms, digging her fingers into his filthy sweatshirt as if she feared he was going to disappear.
"You have to start chemotherapy now!" she told him, breaking into a disconsolate crying that shook her shoulders completely. "The doctor was very clear, Colin. Every day you spend lying here, feeling sorry for yourself over a woman who doesn't deserve you, is a day you gift to the illness. We lost too much time looking for other diagnoses and covering up your problems! Everything went to hell because of waiting!"
He stood completely paralyzed, feeling the trembling of her hands. His mother collapsed against his chest, hiding her face against him, sobbing with an anguish so heartbreaking that it hurt more than the cancer itself or Marina's betrayal. Seeing her like that, destroyed because of him, was like a reality check straight to the heart.
"I beg you, son... please, I beg you," she pleaded through tears, squeezing him with the little strength she had left. "Don't do this to me. Don't let yourself die. Fight, please. Do it for me, do it for your siblings... Go to the hospital and start that treatment. I can't lose you, Colin. I couldn't bear it."
All the pride and desire to sink evaporated. The smell of disinfectant in the house, the trash bags ready at the door, and the crying of the woman who had given him life dragged him away from self-pity. He had a real battle in front of him, and although at that moment his own life mattered very little to him, his mother's pain mattered completely.
Slowly, he lifted his arms and wrapped them around her, pulling her close, inhaling the familiar scent of her perfume while his own tears, finally clear of alcohol and loaded with a raw and painful resolution, began to roll down his face. He was going to do it. Solely for her, but he was going to do it.
Now, he found himself at the hospital looking for Doctor Henry. He knew perfectly well what awaited him behind that door; he knew that a big argument with the doctor was coming, one for which he had no defense. He had warned him with severity weeks ago: time was gold, and he had taken it upon himself to waste it. First, due to the stubbornness of his siblings who insisted on not accepting reality, and then, due to his own emotional collapse following Marina's betrayal.
He was aware that the situation was no longer the same. He knew he would have to undergo the studies again to see how bad things were, to measure the real progress of the illness and check how much ground they had lost due to his negligence. The margin for error had vanished.
That was why he let him say everything he had to say to him, remaining in silence and absorbing every reprimand, willing to comply with whatever was necessary just to start the chemotherapy and fulfill the promise he had made to his mother.
After making clear to him the danger of having postponed the treatment, the doctor filled out several medical orders and sent him to get the studies he needed urgently: a computed tomography (CT) scan to evaluate the current state of his organs, an echocardiogram to verify that his heart would withstand the drugs, and a complete blood count (CBC) along with liver and kidney function tests to determine the exact doses of the chemotherapy.
With the handful of orders in his hand, went directly to the hospital laboratory to start with the blood tests. However, the hospital system seemed to turn against him.
The nurse who was on duty was not arriving. Sitting in the cold chair of the extraction room, looked at the clock on the wall with growing frustration. He had been waiting for her for thirty minutes and the woman simply did not appear, which only increased his anxiety to finish with all this ordeal once and for all.
"This is the limit," he said to himself, watching how the hand of the clock advanced without mercy.
When he grew tired of waiting for her, he decided he wouldn't waste another second. He stood up with determination to open the door and go complain at the reception, but he didn't manage to touch the handle. Just at that instant, someone opened it with force from the outside, causing him to bump directly into the wooden structure.
"Ouch!" he exclaimed, stepping back a pace suddenly and bringing a hand to his forehead, where the impact was already beginning to throb.
"Oh, my God! I am so sorry, truly I am sorry!" a short, red-haired woman entered saying, almost tripping over her own feet from the rush. Her face was flushed with guilt and her uniform was somewhat untidy. "Let me see, please..."
Without asking permission, the young woman approached him and checked him carefully, stretching a bit to reach his forehead. She moved her hands with great delicacy, parting his hair to make sure he was okay and that the bump hadn't escalated. Colin stood still, a bit thrown off by the sudden closeness and by the whirlwind of apologies emanating from her.
"Don't worry, I'm fine, it was just the scare," he managed to say, lowering his hand.
As soon as she made sure he was and saw that there was no wound or serious swelling, she exhaled a sigh of relief, letting her shoulders drop. With a kind smile that contrasted completely with the coldness of the hospital, she introduced herself:
"What a relief... My apologies for the delay, there was an emergency on floor D, I'm Penelope."