Chương 1
"The first time I heard my husband laugh like that, my eight-year-old daughter was breathing through a plastic tube.
Holly’s hospital room smelled of antiseptic, warm blankets, and the strawberry lotion I rubbed into her hands every night because chemotherapy had turned her skin dry enough to crack.
The monitor beside her bed kept a slow, stubborn rhythm, each beep sounding to me like a small argument against death.
Then Derek chuckled.
He stood near the window with my sister Vanessa, their reflections overlapping in the dark glass as if they had already decided they belonged together.
Vanessa rested one hand on the curve of her seven-month pregnancy.
Derek’s child was inside her.
They had stopped denying it three weeks earlier, the same week Holly’s oncologist told us the cancer had spread again.
I had not slept in thirty-six hours.
My sweatshirt had a brown coffee stain down one sleeve, my hair was twisted into a knot that hurt my scalp, and my fingers would not stop trembling no matter how tightly I folded them together.
I had just come back from a consultation with Dr. Patel about an experimental treatment program in Boston.
He had been careful not to call it a miracle.
Doctors who spent their lives around desperate parents seemed to learn early that the word miracle could be cruel.
The treatment was expensive, enrollment was limited, and Holly was sick enough that every day mattered.
But there was money.
Not Derek’s money.
Not really mine, either.
There was the education account I had built for Holly since she was a baby, money from my mother’s estate, and a protected trust my mother had established shortly before she died.
Derek knew enough about the accounts to know they existed.
He did not know enough to understand what he could not touch.
When I stepped into the room, Vanessa saw me first.
Her expression tightened, and she moved her hand away from Derek’s arm.
Derek did not bother.
“Tell her,” Vanessa murmured.
Derek exhaled through his nose as if I had interrupted a meeting.
“Marissa, we need to be realistic.”
I looked past him at my daughter.
Holly lay beneath a blanket covered in tiny yellow ducks, her cheeks too pale, her eyelashes dark against skin that seemed almost translucent beneath the fluorescent light.
One of her hands rested around the ear of a stuffed rabbit she had named Captain Bun when she was four.
“Realistic about what?” I asked.
Derek shifted his weight.
“About what comes next.”
“What comes next is Boston.”
His mouth flattened.
“We don’t know that.”
“I spoke to Dr. Patel.”
“And he said it might work.”
“He said she qualifies to be considered.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No.”
I took off my jacket and hung it over the back of the chair beside Holly’s bed because my hands needed something ordinary to do.
“It isn’t.”
Vanessa glanced toward the hallway.
A nurse pushed a supply cart past the open door, humming softly to herself.
For two seconds nobody spoke.
Then Derek said, “You’ve been throwing money at this for almost two years.”
I turned around.
He seemed to hear himself only after the sentence was out.
His eyes flicked toward Holly and then back to me.
Vanessa whispered his name.
He rubbed his jaw.
“That came out wrong.”
“No,” I said.
“I think it came out exactly right.”
He lowered his voice.
“I’m saying there has to be a point where we think about the whole family.”
“The whole family.”
“Yes.”
I looked at Vanessa’s stomach.
She crossed her arms over it.
Derek followed my gaze and gave a small, humorless smile.
That was when Vanessa laughed.
Not loudly.
More like a breath through her nose.
It was the kind of sound sisters make over something ridiculous at Thanksgiving, the kind that had once made me laugh too because Vanessa could turn a bad dinner into a private joke with one raised eyebrow.
The sound hit me harder than shouting would have.
Derek glanced at her, then laughed with her.
Something cold moved through me.
“What exactly is funny?” I asked.
Vanessa stopped.
Derek didn’t.
“Nothing.”
“Then explain it.”
He looked irritated now, which somehow made everything worse.
“Marissa, don’t do this here.”
“Do what?”
“Turn every conversation into a crisis.”
I stared at the tube taped near Holly’s mouth.
“You’re right.”
My voice sounded strangely calm.
“This would be a terrible place for a crisis.”
Vanessa stepped away from the window.
“I think what Derek means is that there are practical realities.”
I looked at my sister.
She was wearing a cream maternity sweater I had given her before I knew who the father was.
I could still remember standing in the boutique, holding it against myself and thinking the color would make her eyes look greener.
“What practical realities?”
She swallowed.
“The money.”
Derek’s shoulders loosened, as if she had finally reached the safe subject.
“Yes.”
He nodded.
“The money.”
I said nothing.
He continued because silence had always made him nervous.
“We have another child coming.”
“You have another child coming.”
His eyes hardened.
“Fine.”
He gestured toward Vanessa.
“My son.”
Vanessa flinched at the possessiveness of it, though she did not correct him.
Derek went on.
“We need housing.”
“You have a house.”
“You have a house.”
It took me a second.
Then I understood.
He was already separating the furniture in his head.
My house.
His future.
Her baby.
Holly’s money.
He had arranged us into columns.
I felt almost impressed by the ugliness of it.
He looked toward Holly and lowered his voice.
“Holly has had everything we could give her.”
I stepped closer.
“Be very careful.”
He ignored the warning.
“She’s been sick for a long time.”
Vanessa whispered, “Derek.”
He raised one hand.
“No, somebody has to say it.”
His face changed then.
May you like
Not dramatically.
It simply lost the expression he wore when he wanted to be thought of as a decent man.
