Cracks

To protect the privacy of those involved, all names have been changed, though the emotions and truths behind each experience remain unchanged. This is my story, raw and honest, but with pseudonyms.

Before I ever moved to Idaho, before the diagnosis was confirmed, before the word “cancer” became the anthem of my every morning, he made me a promise.

“If it doesn’t work out here,” he said, his voice slow and certain in that way men get when they’re saying things they believe, “I’ll take you anywhere in the country. You, the dog, your things. I won’t leave you worse off than I found you.”

I believed him. Maybe because I wanted to. Maybe because it was easier than admitting I already had nowhere else to go.

But the first crack split clean across a Sunday.

The Hunter was building a fence for horses that didn’t exist yet. Horses that, in the pit of my gut, I already knew never would. He claimed it was a “smoking good deal,” that the Facebook stranger with two different phone numbers and an accent that felt as though it had crossed continents didn’t set off every scam radar he had like it did for me.

I told him it didn’t feel right. I told him it wasn’t the time.

I had a tumor in my body the size of a fist, and he was sending money to a man he’d never met. Twice. A deposit to hold the horses until he could figure out where to keep them. He planned to house them on one of his twin’s rental plots until he could buy land of his own. There was no land. There was no plan. Just a want disguised as a need. And when The Hunter decided he needed something, the rest of us just had to fall in line.

I didn’t. I couldn’t. But it didn’t matter.

His sons, the Quiet Twin and the Wild Twin, came running, boots caked in that dry Idaho dust, all rugged denim and hoodie sleeves. His youngest daughter, Homegrown, I called her because she'd been raised in that valley the same way they raised their potatoes: local, rooted, and never leaving, showed up late. She had two months left before her dad’s child support ran out, which made her, begrudgingly, part of the fence crew. Still technically a minor, still technically under his roof, but still young enough to roll her eyes the entire time.

Precious Pixels (the name I gave the Wild Twin’s girlfriend, thanks to her painfully unoriginal Facebook photography business) sat at the kitchen table, having tinsel threaded through her hair by her baby sister, an ornament that stood out like a Christmas tree in the middle of June. She had a Hoover’s Hatchery catalog spread out in front of her, every page marked with Sharpie.

“Buff Orpingtons lay rich golden yolks, but they’re broody and don’t like to be messed with,” she explained, like this was sacred knowledge passed down from one matriarchal chicken whisperer to the next. “Easter Eggers are friendlier, prettier; those blue and green eggs sell better. But they don’t always lay consistently.”

I nodded like I’d grown up in a chicken coop, but really, I had only dreamt of a life where Sundays stretched on without schedules, where mornings were slow and quiet with the soft cluck of hens in the background. The Hunter and I had talked about getting chickens when we had a home of our own. Sourdough rising on the counter. A garden. Maybe even peace. I thought I could learn to love a slower life, a rural life. A life with the Hunter.

Mama June barked something from the other room, her presence storming through the house. She was loud, chain-smoking, unapologetically opinionated. There was always some tension when she was around, like a knife left just a little too close to the cutting board. I didn’t know the full story between her and the Wild Twin or her daughter, but you could feel it in the room. Nobody made eye contact for too long, and sentences trailed off when she walked in.

Outside, the Hunter and the boys were building the fence. It stretched wide across the uneven dirt, corner posts anchored deep and sure, each panel aligned like a row of sharp, clean teeth. He was proud of it, kept running his palm across the top rail like a man admiring a new rifle. They’d built it from scratch in a day, sweat-stained and sunburned, all hands on deck for horses that might never come.

The Hunter was completely out of his depth when it came to anything online, especially Facebook Marketplace. He’d never really used the Internet, used to a small-town world where your word was law and a handshake sealed any deal. He thought the transaction was as good as done, convinced the horses were just waiting for a trailer and a handshake. I knew better. I said so. He didn’t listen. He rarely did.

Instead he spent eight hours on his one day off building a fence anyway.

That day was the first crack. The first hairline fracture in the illusion of partnership. Not because he made a bad deal, got scammed, and wasted a full day of everyone's time but because he made it without me. Because he put his faith in a Facebook Marketplace con artist before he put it in the woman with cancer sleeping in his bed. Because when I said, this doesn’t feel right, what he heard was static.

That was the day I started measuring my words. The day I learned how little weight they carried. The day I realized he didn’t want a life with me. He wanted a life where I didn’t get in the way.

But that fence wasn’t the only thing being built without me.

We never spent time alone. Not really. Not the quality kind that mattered.

The Hunter woke before the sun, gone by five and back by seven, if the weather held up and nothing slowed him down. By the time he came home, he was hollowed out from the day, just a shell of sweat and dirt and half-mumbled sentences. I’d make dinner. Something simple. He didn’t like to venture out, so dinner was always tailored to him, the same familiar cuts, the same comforting routine. He’d try something new if I made it, but only under protest. We’d eat dinner at the dining room table, talk about nothing, and fall into bed by nine p.m., like strangers politely sharing a room. Our conversations drifted slowly from depth and meaning into empty gestures, routine, shallow small talk that never reached beyond the surface.

I thought maybe that was just how men were raised in small towns: practical, tight-lipped, all action and no ask. But weeks turned into months, and not once did he ask me what I wanted to do. Not once did he plan a date. Not once did he say, let’s go somewhere, let’s do something, what would make you feel alive today?

And maybe that’s the part that stung the most: I was grappling with my mortality, and still, he made no effort to help me live.

Every weekend, he was either hunting or with his family. If it wasn’t one, it was the other. There was no time reserved for just the two of us to get to know each other on a deeper level. He shared everything with everyone: his time, his energy, his presence, even his money—he paid my car loan—but he never shared himself with me.

There was no intimacy. No stolen glances across the kitchen while I washed the dishes and he wiped them. No lazy Sunday morning kisses. In fact, no kisses at all. No photos. Not a single picture of me taken by the man I had uprooted to build a life with. Not even when everything felt worth capturing, when the world seemed to slow down, when I needed to see myself in a moment of joy, of hope. I would photograph him. I would photograph us. But he never turned the lens around. It was like I was there, but not worth remembering.

Having photos taken would have been a way for me to anchor moments, especially in the chaos of cancer. It's easy to lose track of who you are when you’re consumed by doctors' appointments and lab work. But in pictures, there’s proof that you existed beyond the illness, proof that life, however fragile, still had moments of beauty and connection. It was about the quiet acknowledgment that I mattered enough to be seen.

I started to feel like a ghost. Like I’d walked into someone else’s house and was pretending to belong. Like I’d been invited to stay, but not to be known.

And yet I stayed.

Because cancer made everything sticky. Because when you’re terrified of dying, even bad company feels better than being alone. I kept telling myself he was tired. He was stressed. He didn’t know how to show affection. That he wasn’t trying to hurt me, he just didn’t know how to love me.

But the truth was: I didn’t need him to love me perfectly.

I just needed him to see me.

But being seen isn’t always about where someone points the camera. Sometimes it’s in the introductions, in the way someone claims you. Or doesn’t.

After a while, he stopped calling me his girlfriend. When we ran into people in town, at the gas station, at The Road House, at the feed store, he’d say, "This is my friend, Rachel." That word stung more than he realized. Friend. Not partner. Not girlfriend. Not the woman he invited into his home, into his bed, into his plans.

I wanted to share our moments, especially with the few friends who understood what I was really going through. They knew about the cancer, the transition, and I wanted them to see my life now. There was beauty in that life, in living in Swan Valley, and I wanted to be open about it. But he wasn’t comfortable with me posting pictures of him online.

I tried to laugh it off, told myself maybe he was just being private, just cautious. But deep down, I knew what it meant. I was something to hide. Something to downplay. And when I brought it up, gently, like someone trying not to startle a sleeping dog, he shrugged and said he didn’t think it was a big deal.

But it was. It was a crack.

I wasn’t working. I couldn’t. I was trying to start cancer treatment, navigating a new state, new insurance, new doctors who kept punting me to the next appointment like a football nobody wanted to carry. I was calling offices, filling out forms, chasing referrals like breadcrumbs just to get seen, just to get started.

Meanwhile, he was working full-time. And I think that somewhere, beneath his silence, he saw me as lazy. As dependent. As not pulling my own weight. He never said it outright, but I felt it in the way he didn't ask how the calls went. In how he never offered to come to an appointment. In how I had to ask, every time, for help.

I’d come from running my own business. Six figures. Clients. Travel. Hustle. And now I was here, reduced to waiting for someone else to determine my worth, needs, and place in this world. I didn’t know how to be this version of myself, this woman who needed, who waited, who asked. I started feeling needy, codependent, and then ashamed.

He didn’t make it easier.

He thanked me for dinner, yes. But he never affirmed who I was. Never said, "You’re handling all of this with grace." Never said, "You’re doing your best." Never said, "I see how hard you’re trying." And I was. I was trying so damn hard to build a life there, to find friends, to stay afloat, to keep some small piece of my identity from drowning.

When someone loves you, they say it in the little things. In the photos they take. In the titles they give you. In the pride with which they share your presence with the world. But I was invisible. In his house. In his life. In his town.

I was scrambling to make meaning out of this place, to build a routine, to contribute, but in the absence of that, I became codependent on the Hunter. For just about everything. Rides. Gas money. Meaning. I was the quintessential submissive girlfriend. And I hated it. I hated how small I was becoming.

Another crack. Then another.

But the cracks weren’t always loud; some of them were stillborn, silent from the start, quietly unraveling without a sound.

A few weeks before the Facebook Market Place horse diabolical, at the beginning of February, he took me into Idaho Falls to go grocery shopping at WinCo. He had offered to take me out to eat, but the truth was, I was trying to save The Hunter money and had to be cautious about what I ate because of the cancer. I thought it was best to cook everything at home from scratch. I had treated this excursion like a date—a chance to connect over my favorite pastime: food.

But The Hunter complained the whole way there, as if the very idea of having to go into the city was an inconvenience. He didn’t appreciate being bothered with it, especially on his day off, a Saturday nonetheless. He could have been out horn hunting in “steep, ignorant country,” as he liked to call the hills.

When we got to the first set of stoplights in town he muttered, “Goddamn everyone and their mother is out in town.” His eyes were fixed on the road, gripping the wheel like he could steer us straight back to the hills with his anger. "Saturday, of all days. This is why I steer clear of town, I don’t like the traffic.” He scowled, tapping the steering wheel.”

I couldn’t help but laugh a little. Coming from a real city, the lack of cars, the empty streets, felt almost absurd. There was barely anyone around, and yet he acted like we were stuck in rush hour traffic in downtown Manhattan. Still, I kept quiet, knowing better than to argue. He hated the city with a passion, despising the way it made him feel tethered, as if a leash were pulling him away from the wilderness he swore by. 

When we pulled into the parking lot, he parked at the very edge, near the Cattle Ranch tractors, even though closer spots were open. It was like he couldn't be bothered to make things easier, even in the smallest ways.

As we started walking to the entrance, he did the thing I had seen my grandfather do to my sweet little old grandmother and swore I’d never put up with myself. He walked fifteen feet ahead of me—not holding my hand beside me, not surveying my surroundings from behind me—just fifteen “I-can’t-be-bothered-to-wait-for-you” feet ahead. 

Inside the store, it was the same. He pushed the cart ahead like a scout sent out to check the terrain. Never beside me. Never with me. I’d watch the distance grow between us in the produce aisle, by the meat counter, near the bulk food section. I’d call to him softly, sometimes loud enough for strangers to turn their heads. He never turned back. He just kept walking, like I was part of the dairy freezer aisle, background noise to his movement.

On our return trip, he complained about the price of groceries. “You need to get just the essentials,” he’d say. I thought I was. Essentials to him were Wonder Bread, processed sandwich meat and cheese, Gatorade, Oreos, and milk.

I could feel his frustration building again, so I tried to placate him, “I think we’ll make that chili you like—really cheap to make, and you’ll love it.”

He grunted in response, not quite convinced. “Yeah, I guess. Just don’t make it like last time. You know, when it was all fancy. I’m just a simple guy. No need for all the extra stuff.”

“I promise,” I said with a forced smile, “no fancy stuff. Just plain old chili.”

I didn’t notice it at first, but after a few trips to town, I began to realize that The Hunter always parked as far from the entrance of a store as possible. It didn’t matter if it was WinCo or Cattle Ranch, he’d circle the lot, passing up spots right by the door, until he found the furthest one away, tucked away at the very edge. At first, I thought maybe he just liked the extra space, but then it became clear. He wanted me to walk. It was a small thing, a quiet assertion of control, forcing me to walk farther, no matter how inconvenient. I took this to mean I was lazy.

Eventually, he started going grocery shopping without me. No warning, no list. Just a stop with his brother on his way back from Jackson Hole. When I’d ask him later, “Did you get—?” he’d cut me off. “Didn’t think you needed anything.”

It was always this way. A space between us, growing without effort, without acknowledgment. The silences didn’t need to be loud or confrontational. They spoke for themselves, and I realized then that it was never about what I needed. It was about what he could do without me. And slowly, that became all I could feel.

There were other things, but the night I thought my bowels were rupturing felt like a final test, the kind of pain that strips away everything but raw, unfiltered fear. The night before I was set to travel to Seattle, a trip my chiropractic Asian friend from Minnesota had booked for me, I thought my bowels had ruptured. I was up until 3 a.m., in pain, constipated—which, ironically, felt like a relief after weeks of constant diarrhea—and unable to pass gas. My stomach swelled, the kind of discomfort that tightens your insides and makes you wonder how long until things go from bad to worse. I feared the worst. A bowel rupture. Stool floating around my organs. Sepsis. My normal ways of soothing pain hadn't worked. Google, always a source of doom, said the best option was the ER.

The closest hospital was an hour away in Idaho Falls. I’d made the trip on my own once before, when I was worried and the Hunter was stubborn. But that night was different. That time, I woke The Hunter.

I shook him awake, my voice tight with pain. “I need you to drive me to the hospital,” I said, voice raw.

He mumbled something incoherent at first, then pulled himself upright. “Is it really necessary?” he asked, blinking the sleep away. I nodded, feeling the weight of the night settle deeper into my bones.

He sighed and groaned, his irritation clear. “This is gonna ruin my whole damn day.” He reached for his Dickies and work boots, his movements slow but methodical, as if the entire world had been put on pause to accommodate my sudden crisis.

As we drove, the first twenty minutes were filled with his complaints. “How necessary is this really, Rachel? You sure this can’t wait?”

“I’m not sure what’s worse,” I shot back, my words sharp, “the idea of having my bowels rupture or you complaining about having to drive me to the hospital at 3 a.m.”

He huffed. “You’re ruining my day. I’m gonna be tired all day for work.”

I snapped. “You have no problem taking a day off for shed hunting, but God forbid you prioritize the woman you brought here to Idaho who has cancer.”

The truck went silent. He didn’t say a word for the rest of the drive. I didn’t want to be the one to break the silence, but the pain gnawed at me, making it hard to think about anything other than how badly I felt. I tried to focus on the road, on the passing lights of the night, but it all blurred together in a haze of exhaustion and dread.

We arrived at the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center sometime around four in the morning. The parking lot was mostly empty, the night shift workers silently moving in and out. I checked in, gave them my details, and waited.

The Hunter sat in the exam room’s guest chair, silent and distant. His eyes didn’t meet mine. The air between us felt heavy, but not because of my pain. The distance had been growing for weeks now, and it seemed as though that same silence had infiltrated the room, wrapping itself around us like a hospital blanket. He didn’t ask how I was feeling. He didn’t even look at me. He just stared at the walls.

After forty minutes of waiting for my CT scan, the Hunter broke the silence, “Do you mind if I wait in the truck and try to get some sleep before work?”

It was five in the morning, and the Quiet Twin was somewhere on Highway 26, on his way to the Hunter’s house so he, his father, and uncle could carpool into Jackson. The Hunter had called his youngest twin, telling him to go ahead without him—that he’d meet him and his brother at the job site. 

I was left alone with the nurses, the doctors, the machines. The CT scan was finally complete. The minutes felt like hours, but eventually, they confirmed what I had feared wasn’t true. My bowels hadn’t ruptured. They had swollen to twice their original size. Relief washed over me, but not completely. The pain was still there. The inflammation was still there. But at least I wasn’t dying.

My boyfriend was being an asshole, and so was my asshole.

They told me it was possible I might need a stint if the inflammation worsened and sent me off with a prescription for painkillers. I didn’t feel any sense of triumph walking out of that room. I felt hollow.

When I climbed back into the truck, the sunlight of morning peeking through the back cabin window, The Hunter turned to me. His first words were blunt.

“So your bowels didn’t rupture?”

I just nodded, feeling drained. I wasn’t sure if he cared or not. His voice was flat, like he didn’t believe it, like he wasn’t interested enough to let himself feel anything about it. But then again, he’d never been one to express much.

I stared out the window, the quiet stretching between us again. 

“Yeah,” I muttered after a long pause. “They’re just swollen.”

He didn’t say anything after that. And silence has its own kind of violence, doesn’t it? The way it builds. How it doesn’t yell, doesn’t strike, doesn’t bruise. It just withdraws. Until you’re no longer sure if you’re being ignored or if you’ve disappeared.

And then there were my own cracks. The ones I was trying to hide.

There’s this question people like to ask when they want to sound philosophical: What came first, the chicken or the egg?

With the Hunter and I, with love and neglect, with fear and alcohol, with abandonment and isolation, it wasn’t linear. It never is.

To be fair to The Hunter, I think it was both. The chicken and the egg showed up cracked and bleeding, simultaneously came together, and combusted mid-air. That’s how it felt. I think we arrived in each other’s lives already cracked. Him with his feral independence. Me with my impossible longing to be chosen. Maybe I had one foot out the door from the start. Already certain that my insecurities and trust issues would drive him away the moment I got too hard to love. The second cancer became too much.

We were yolk and mess. Nothing to hold us together. 

When I moved in with The Hunter, I wasn’t drinking. I wasn’t smoking. I’d made it through the worst of my vices and I was clean. But Swan Valley was winter and isolation, a cabin too small and a silence too thick. I felt like a caged animal, pacing the same worn circles in a place that didn’t want me. I was lonely. So lonely. And eventually I got cabin fever. 

Eventually, I broke.

I started drinking again. Quietly at first. Just enough to take the edge off the hard days. Just enough to dull the ache of being invisible in a house where I was supposed to matter. But it caught up with me. There were nights, few and far between, but they occurred, when he came home and found me drunk. Nights I don’t remember fully—just fragments, blurry and full of shame. The night I passed out on the couch, red wine stains around my lips. The night after I got back from Seattle–the trip that had helped me realize the Hunter didn’t love me–when I had blacked out before he returned home from work. 

I knew what it looked like. I hated how easily I slipped. But I also knew what it felt like to be alone in your own life. So I found a therapist. Convincing myself if there was ever a time to pay a stranger to listen, this was it. 

Then I started having the hard conversations. I asked him where we were headed. I tried to talk about the future—what we were building, if anything. But every time I opened that door, he’d step back. “What do you want to do?” he’d ask, his voice flat.

It wasn’t an invitation. It was a dare. A push. A test. He never asked, “What do we need to do to make this work?” Never said, “Tell me how I can meet you in this.”

And that was the problem.

I was constantly trying to meet him where he was, bending myself into shapes that didn’t fit just to be palatable. To survive. To stay. To start treatment. 

But him? He stayed exactly the same. Exactly, stubbornly the same. 

And then the lease came up on the farmhouse we were renting.

We started looking for houses, but even that felt lopsided. His vision. His future. He talked about “my house,” never “our house.” He talked about leaving it to his daughter one day. I realized I wasn’t building a home. I was a placeholder. A tenant. A woman passing through a story that didn’t belong to her.

We broke up. Not with a bang. Just a quiet unraveling.

But agreed that I would stay in Idaho. Because treatment had to start. Because I didn’t know where else to go. Because I had already gotten my chemo port put in. 

My cousin came to visit, and for a few days, the world softened. The Hunter was charming again. Funny. Easygoing. I remembered why I fell for him. And for a moment, I let myself believe it could still work.

Until it didn’t.

He told me, out of nowhere, the second to the last day my cousin was in town, the day we went drift boating, “I don’t want it to get to the point where I have to kick you out.” And just like that, the floor dropped. He framed it as we needed to save for a house, but what he really meant was: you need to leave.

The rest happened fast.

There was a photoshoot for this blog, something I’d planned for months. I had a chocolate fountain my cousin had ordered me shipped to the Wild Twin’s house. Along with some other supplies. Cheap props I’d gotten off of amazon. A creative direction I had planned to return after the shoot itself. I had told the photographer–Precious Pixels “Don’t tell him.” in reference to the Hunter. Not because I wanted to be deceitful, but because I knew the Hunter wouldn’t understand the idea of content being currency like I did. There was simply no point in arguing with him over it. Add that it was faster than having anything delivered to the post office in Swan Valley.

The Wild Twin’s girlfriend Precious Pixels had agreed to photograph the shoot. A photographer trade for coverage of her gender reveal, baby shower, and Easter. 

The night before the shoot, she and the Wild Twin had one of their explosive, petty Facebook spats. The next day on set, I could sense her demeanor and asked her if her and the Wild Twin had ever considered therapy. “He won’t go.” She finally offered and then shared texts that read like verbal warfare. I didn’t judge—I’d been there. And reading them made me grateful that for all our problems, the Hunter and I never spoke to each other like that. 

The photoshoot wasn’t what I had planned or expected, but it wasn’t the first time I would learn to live with a vision that was compromised because of budget, time, and collaboration constraints. 

The next day, the Wild Twin came over to see his father and ignored me entirely. Wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t speak. I went out to the drive way to say hello since the Hunter was off fetching hay for the horses, and when the Wild Twin saw me, he reversed his car out of park and drove away. The Hunter came back with him an hour later, and I watched them light up a joint and laugh on the porch while I stood inside, unwelcome.

Turns out, the Wild Twin blamed me for getting kicked out of his rental house the night before. After my photoshoot. Said I’d interfered. Said I’d crossed a line. No one clarified what line. No one stood up for me. The Wild Twin just screamed at me and blamed me for interfering in his relationship.

And The Hunter? He told me, a few days later, that no one in his family liked me. His stepmother thought I was rude for asking her to pause sending treats while I underwent treatment for cancer—because sugar feeds cancer and so did her well meaning cookies. His brother asked why I was “his problem.” His parents thought I was a threat. The Quiet Twin thought I was a distraction. 

It was over.

He told me I had to go. That I could no longer stay there through treatment like we’d discussed. “You didn’t think it was important to tell me if your cousin was giving you money for your photoshoot?” Said the man that had just bought a house without me.  

He said he’d pay my car loan for the month of May. Then didn’t.

Fifteen days. That’s how long I had to undo a life I had tried to build in Idaho.

Fifteen days to move mountains—or at least move a woman with cancer, no savings, and a chemo port stitched into her chest. Fifteen days to unpin the photographs I’d never been in. To pack a house that never had room for me. To call clinics and cancel appointments I’d fought like hell to secure.

The man who once swore he’d never leave me worse off had already done exactly that.

And worse—he’d done it in such a way that I still wanted him to stop me as I left.

Read part II here.

A blog post by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer