Chapter 3

Three days after the induced labor, oncology came to consult.

Dr. Dickerson went through my test reports one sheet at a time, reading slowly.

"Anemia. Hemoglobin's at fifty-eight. Malnutrition."

"The lesion in your stomach is still bleeding, and there's widespread metastasis in the abdominal cavity."

He looked up at me.

"Ms. Larson, your body can't handle standard chemotherapy right now. The drugs are highly toxic. You wouldn't get through it."

I asked flatly,

"Then what am I supposed to do?"

He paused.

"Let's build up your nutrition first. Once your levels come up, we can try palliative chemo."

"But I have to be honest with you. Even with chemo, all it does is buy time. It won't cure you."

I pressed further,

"How much time could it buy?"

He was quiet, looking back down at the sheets in his hand.

I was grateful for his silence. It meant he was actually calculating, not just placating me.

"If we stop the bleeding and get your nutrition up, optimistically you'd have six months to a year."

"But your baseline is very weak right now. If there's another major bleed or organ failure, it could be just a few months."

I nodded.

In that moment I felt unexpectedly calm.

I even felt a little like laughing.

If Grant were here, he'd be very satisfied with a number like that.

Clear, quantified, measurable.

Dr. Dickerson said we could try treatment, but every chemo session needed a family member present to sign.

Except I didn't know who I'd get to sign it.

I wanted to live.

I was only twenty-seven this year. I wanted to see my mom's breakfast stand move into a bigger storefront.

I wanted to go to the coast just once, to feel the blue sky and the sea.

But my illness was already late-stage. How much longer would more treatment really buy me?

I sat in the chair, my fingertips unconsciously digging into my palm.

All the doubt and hurt I'd pushed down came slowly welling up.

At three months pregnant, the morning sickness was so bad I felt awful all over, and I tried to find him at the company without anyone noticing.

I never made it into the CEO's office. I just waited half an hour in the break room.

Nora came out and told me,

"Mr. Mason says the company is cracking down hard on office relationships right now. You'd better leave through the staff entrance."

At four months pregnant, I fell in front of the office building.

He was upstairs that day. I texted him, and he replied,

【Have HR take you to the hospital. Don't disrupt the other departments' work.】

The day I first got the biopsy report, my first instinct was still to go to him.

I walked from the hospital back to the company with the diagnosis in my hand, and I walked that stretch very slowly.

The whole way, I rehearsed my opening lines in my head, over and over.

I told myself, lying to myself, that in the face of life and death he'd stop and really look at me, that he'd remember we once promised to grow old together.

If he showed even a trace of the warmth he used to have,

then however much it hurt, however hard it got, I'd try to hold on.

Then I ran into the two of them in the elevator lobby.

He said, "Stomach trouble is no small thing. Rules are made by people too."

To go along with the rule he'd set banning office relationships,

I'd worked as an ordinary employee in the marketing department while I was heavily pregnant, and not one person on the whole floor knew I was his wife.

Now he was making an exception.

It wasn't that he didn't know how to be tender. He just wasn't tender toward me.

On the fifth day in the hospital, another photo went up in the company group chat.

The hospital's registration hall, him standing in line at the window, a cup of warm porridge in his hand.

Someone in the group asked if Secretary Henson wasn't feeling well.

Grant stepped in himself to protect her reputation:

【Secretary Henson had some stomach upset from entertaining an investor. I came along to have her checked out. There's no need to read too much into it.】

But when I took frequent leave during my pregnancy because of my health, and the department started whispering about it, he ignored it completely.

"Personal health issues for an ordinary employee are minor. Ignore them and it'll die down on its own."

His so-called avoiding-suspicion was nothing but an excuse.

The sun was fine outside, the ward bright, and still I felt the cold seep into the gaps between my bones.

A week later, my levels were barely stable, and I could be discharged.

Dr. Dickerson wrote up the paperwork and told me to come back in two weeks to assess the chemo situation.

"You have to come. Don't carry it all by yourself."

"Okay."

When I said okay, I was thinking about something else.

Go back, and clear away every trace that I'd ever existed in that home, one piece at a time.