Angels Watching Over You
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 7: What Bea Carried
Bea had been twenty years old when Cissy’s father decided that a baby was a much larger thing to be responsible for than he’d signed up for, and twenty-one by the time the last of his half-hearted phone calls trailed off into nothing at all. She didn’t spend much time thinking about Darnell Price these days — she’d made her peace with that door closing years ago, the way you make peace with weather you can’t do anything about — but treatment rounds and hospital corridors had a way of dragging old things back up to the surface whether she invited them or not.
It was a Tuesday, one of the rare ones where Cissy felt well enough to want company beyond Liam, that she asked about him outright.
“Mama. Do I have a daddy?”
Bea kept brushing out the wig they’d been fitted for weeks before, the motion steady even though her stomach had dropped straight through the floor. “You do. Everybody does, baby.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t rightly know,” Bea said, choosing the plain truth over a prettier lie, the way she’d promised herself she always would if this question ever came. “He left before you were old enough to remember him. That’s not because of anything you did. Some people just aren’t built for staying, and that’s a thing about them, not a thing about you.”
Cissy considered this with the same grave seriousness she gave most hard information lately. “Liam’s daddy is dead. An angel.”
“That’s right.”
“Is mine dead too?”
“No, baby. Far as I know, he’s alive somewhere. He’s just not here.”
“Which is worse,” Cissy asked, “dead or not here?”
Bea had no honest answer for that one that wouldn’t cost her something to say out loud, so she only kept brushing, and after a moment Cissy let it go, satisfied for now with knowing at least the shape of the thing, if not the reason for it.
“Do you think he’d like me?” Cissy asked, later, once the wig sat straight and she’d stopped studying it in the mirror. “If he ever met me.”
“Baby, everybody who meets you likes you. You’re an easy person to love.”
“But him specifically. My actual daddy.”
Bea set the brush down and pulled her daughter into her lap instead of answering right away, because the honest answer — that she genuinely didn’t know, that Darnell Price had never given either of them the chance to find out — wasn’t one a five-year-old needed handed to her raw. “I think anybody who didn’t like you would just be showing you something true about themselves, not about you. You remember that, whatever anybody ever does or doesn’t do.”
Cissy nodded against her shoulder, accepting it the way she accepted most hard truths lately — filed away rather than fully understood, to be taken back out and turned over again some other day, when she was older, when there might be more of an answer waiting for her than her mother currently had to give.
Her own mother called from Georgia most Sunday evenings, the way she had every Sunday of Bea’s adult life, and treatment had done nothing to change the schedule even as it changed nearly everything else about the conversation.
“You sound tired, baby,” her mother said, that Sunday, in the voice she used for observations she’d already decided were facts rather than questions.
“I am tired, Mama. It’s been a long month.”
“You know you could bring her down here. Let me help. Lord knows there’s better weather for a sick child than whatever mess Maryland’s got going on this time of year.”
“Her whole medical team is here. Her whole life is here.” Bea kept her voice level, the way she’d trained herself to over a dozen versions of this same conversation. “I can’t just uproot her treatment because the weather’s nicer somewhere else.”
“I’m not talking about the weather, and you know it. I’m talking about you doing all of this by yourself up there, with nobody but a neighbor to lean on.”
“Étaín’s not just a neighbor, Mama.”
“I know what you’ve told me about her. I’m only saying blood is blood. I could be there in a day if you asked me to come.”
Bea closed her eyes, and counted, the way she’d learned to do with this argument, which surfaced in some form nearly every call. “I know you could. And I love you for offering it every single week. But I’ve built something here that’s working, as much as anything about this is working. I don’t want to start over somewhere else just because it would be easier for you to worry about me up close instead of from a phone.”
There was a silence on the line, her mother taking that in the way she took most things she didn’t like but couldn’t quite argue with. “You’ve always been stubborn,” she said finally. “Just like your daddy.”
“I know, Mama.”
“You call me the second anything changes. Good or bad. I don’t care what hour.”
“I will.”
She never did call in the middle of the night, in the end, on any of the nights that would have qualified — not out of any real intention to keep her mother in the dark, but because by the time anything was bad enough to call about, there was never a spare minute left over for anyone who wasn’t already standing in the room.
Bea did the arithmetic on her own most nights, after Cissy was down — the paralegal salary that had felt like plenty for the two of them a year ago and felt like nothing at all now, stretched thin between hospital parking and the co-pays that arrived faster than she could track them and the days off work that had gone from occasional to constant, until her supervisor, a decent enough man named Frank who’d lost a nephew to leukemia a decade back, had quietly restructured her caseload without ever making her ask for the accommodation directly.
“You don’t have to keep thanking me for this,” he told her, the third or fourth time she’d tried to. “I know what this costs a person. Just do right by your girl. The filing will still be here.”
There was one afternoon, a few months in, when it nearly came apart on her at her desk — a phone call from the hospital about a delayed lab result timed exactly wrong against a filing deadline Frank couldn’t push for her twice in one week, and Bea found herself sitting perfectly still at her desk after hanging up, staring at nothing, until a coworker two desks over asked if she was all right and she realized she’d been crying for some unknown span of time without noticing she’d started.
Frank found her in the break room a few minutes later, getting herself back together over a cup of coffee she wasn’t drinking.
“I can’t keep doing this to you,” she said, before he’d said a word. “Falling apart at my desk. That’s not what you’re paying me for.”
“I’m not paying you to never fall apart,” Frank said. “I’m paying you to do good work, which you do, on the days you’re able to. The other days, you’re allowed to just be a person whose kid is sick. Nobody here’s counting that against you.”
“Feels like I should be able to hold it together better than this.”
“Bea.” He said it plainly, the way you’d correct a fact rather than offer comfort. “Your daughter has cancer. There is no version of holding it together better than you already are. I’ve watched you do this for months now, and you haven’t dropped a single deadline that actually mattered. Give yourself the one you didn’t drop today too.”
She hadn’t cried again in front of him after that, not because the offer to fall apart stopped mattering, but because something in being told plainly that she was already doing enough had loosened a knot she hadn’t fully realized she was carrying.
It was Étaín, in the end, who Bea found herself leaning on for the parts even Frank’s kindness couldn’t reach — not just the medical translation, though that mattered plenty, but the sheer loneliness of being the only adult in a house responsible for absolutely everything.
“I keep waiting to feel like I know what I’m doing,” Bea admitted one night, the two of them back on the porch steps that had become their unofficial confessional. “Twenty-five years old, raising a dying child by myself, and some days I still feel like I’m playing at being a grown woman instead of actually being one.”
“You are one,” Étaín said. “Being certain isn’t a requirement of the job. If it were, no parent alive would qualify.”
“Doesn’t feel that way from in here.”
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