She lifts her head, and despite the puffiness around her eyes, she’s never looked more beautiful. So raw. So open. So…loving.
Yes. That’s what I see in her eyes. It’s love. For me. Shelovesme. She’sinlove with me. Sometimes I still have trouble believing it.
“You’re hurting too, Luc.”
“Yeah, but—”
She kisses the excuses from my mouth. “No buts,” she whispers against my lips. “We’re in thistogether.”
There it is again. That word. Those three wonderful syllables that mean everything.
“Master Sergeant Dubois?”
The sound of Dr. Beckett’s voice has us jumping from our seats. Maggie sniffles and wipes the wetness from her cheeks when the doctor extends a hand my way. “I wish we were meeting again under better circumstances,” he says, and then shakes Maggie’s hand in turn.
“Whatarethe circumstances?” I demand. “We’ve been told fuck all about what’s going on. Forgive my language, Doc. But we’re the only family he’s got, and not being allowed to—”
“I’ve taken care of that,” Beckett interrupts. “I’ve told the nurses that both you and Miss Carter are to be treated as his next of kin and afforded all due rights and considerations.”
“Hallelujah,” Maggie whispers.
“Can we see him now?” I ask anxiously. All night long, I’ve felt like if we could see him, touch him,talkto him, he’d come to.
Maggie thinks there’s magic in moonlight? Well, I say there’s magic in the three ofus.When we’re together, anything is possible.
“Let’s talk first.” Beckett motions to the chairs Maggie and I vacated and then pulls a third chair up in front of them. When he takes a seat, there’s nothing for me and Maggie to do but follow suit.
She shoots me a quick look, and the fear in her eyes mirrors my own. Again, she reaches for my hand. Again, I find her fingers icy cold.
“One minute, he was fine,” I tell the doctor, absently chafing some warmth back into Maggie’s hand. “The next, he was chasing down some woman he thought was his mother, who’s dead by the way, and then crumpling to the ground with convulsions.”
“He suffered a grand mal seizure,” Beckett explains. “It’s rare for hallucinations to precede an event like that, but it’s not unheard of.”
I nod. “And you reckon all this is on account of his brain injury? Or could it be a side effect of his concussion, or—”
“Sergeant Armstrong is suffering from edema of the brain,” Beckett cuts in. At our confused looks, he’s quick to add, “That means swelling. The staff here have been treating him with steroids all night long, and I can report that his scans show the swelling has come down some. Not as much as we’d like, but some.”
“Does that mean he’ll be awake soon?” Maggie asks at the same time that I say, “But whatcausedthe swelling in the first place?”
Beckett glances from me to Maggie, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. His expression is kind. Too kind. So kind that a lump forms in my throat, and a stone lodges in my chest.
“Sergeant Armstrong will likely regain consciousness.” His voice is soft. “But it will be temporary at best.”
I swear the floor tumbles away beneath me, leaving me suspended in midair, waiting for the fall.
“Why temporary?” I barely recognize my own voice.
“Nine months ago, Sergeant Armstrong was diagnosed with stage four glioblastoma,” he says quietly. “His doctors discovered the mass while treating his head injury following the suicide bombing. Now the tumor has grown so large it’s putting pressure on his medulla oblongata, the part of the brain responsible for regulating breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and consciousness.”
I don’t know whatglioblastomameans. But I know the wordsmassandtumor. And I know thatstage fouris a cancer diagnosis. The bad kind. Theworst.
Maggie knows it too. An awful sound seeps from her. Instinct has me pulling her into my arms again. Disbelief has me telling the doctor, “But he hasn’t been receiving treatment.” I shake my head. “There hasn’t been any radiation or chemotherapy or—”
“Sergeant Armstrong elected to forgo treatment,” Beckett explains. “The original tumor was too deep in his brain to make surgery an option, and he didn’t want to suffer the side effects of less invasive therapies that might have extended his life but also would have negatively affected his physical condition. He chose quality of life over quantity of life.”
Even now, with Cash alive and breathing, with his heart beating and his brain synapses firing, Dr. Beckett speaks of him in the past tense. I want to punch him in the face for that. I want to throw my chair at him. I want to kick and scream and curse.
But most of all, I want to beg him to tell me it’s not true. To tell me there’s something to be done.
