CHAPTER
ONE
My whole body is vibrating,chest clenched tightly, as if to somehow protect my heart from shattering into a million pieces. You should’ve thought about that sooner…before you failed me.
“Adhira, hey, are you with me?” My eyes refocus, returning to the present in slow motion. The present is the last place I want to be, with its desolate white walls and the overpowering stench of antiseptic.
Both were once comforting to me, a reminder of my dreams for the future, but now? They’re nothing more than a twisted inside joke between my blood and my unsung reality. Only the uncomfortable, hard plastic chair cradling my limp body holds me upright in this office, where a pit of agony twists my insides—a place I dread becoming too familiar with.
When my eyes finally collide with Dr. Alvarez’s, I give her a slow nod, one I’m certain isn’t reassuring. My gaze drops to the white collar of her impeccably pressed button-down top and the teal-and-gold stethoscope draped around her neck, yearning scraping at my gut as I begin to catalogue all the things I’m going to lose in this process and every way I’ll need to change my life to protect those I love.
My brain sorts the losses the only way it knows how—item by item—because control, even imaginary, feels safer than chaos.
The first change of many: my enrolment in the physician associate programme in the autumn. The second: distancing myself from anyone who’d feel the pain of my absence, if it were to come to that.
The sound of her smooth, dulcet tone distracts me from my list. “I know this must come as a huge shock, and there are a lot of steps that might feel overwhelming as we tackle this, but you aren’t alone, okay?”
Maybe alone is precisely where I need to be so I can fall apart without fear of those I love doing the same. The air feels too thick to breathe, but solitude might be the only oxygen I have left.
I nod once more, the chill of this office shifting into a numbness that settles into my bones, the bright sun hanging high in the sky beyond the wall of windows doing nothing to warm me. The weather in Embershire is never this beautiful, this serene, and promising of the life that might bloom under its rays. It feels almost poetic in its mockery.
I fidget in the uncomfortable chair, shifting my legs, and tear at my new gel-polish manicure in an effort to assuage my nervous energy.
“Adhira, are you sure you don’t want your parents here for this? I know you’re an adult, but family support?—”
“No.” I cut her off, shaking my head with enough force to rattle my brain in my skull. The sharp, repetitive tick, tick, tick of the wall clock and the buzzing of the electricity make my skin crawl with overwhelm. “They can’t be involved. I won’t have it. I won’t break their hearts.” The words come out harsher than I intend, and as they do, tiny shards of the broken glass my life has become shift out of place, slicing straight through me. A lump forms in my throat, and I swallow hard around it. I know what I need to do to protect my parents, even if it means I suffer as a result. My mother’s voice echoes through the fog—“Balvaan thajo, vidvaan thajo, aayushmaan thajo”—may you be strong, may you be learned, may you live long. I’ve heard it all my life, and now it feels like both a comfort and a curse.
“Dr. Alvarez,” I say, my voice small but steady. I meet her gaze again and fight the hot tears brimming in my eyes. “I need you to say it one more time so I believe you,” I choke out, my composure crumbling around me. Dissociation will only take me so far. My fingers tingle, the room shrinking around the thud of my pulse.
She nods, leaning across her desk and extending her hands for me to take if I wish to. I grab onto them as if they’re my personal lifeline, and God, I hope that’s exactly what they are.
“Adhira,” she says. Her deep brown eyes, rimmed with thick lashes, are filled with hope and determination as they bore into me, though my emotions don’t reflect the same. Dread shoots up my spine like a bullet as she speaks her next words.
“You have Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”
CHAPTER
TWO
Papa pressesa kiss to my forehead before he eases himself into the cab; Mummy sits beside him, brown eyes shiny as she peers up at me. A small flicker of warmth passes through me at their presence, quickly snuffed out before it can grow.
“Maari laali ae ketlu mehnat karyu,”?* Papa says for the hundredth time since they arrived for my graduation.
“Thank you,” I murmur, the words catching in my throat. Behind it is the small, sharp thought I shove away: If my body doesn’t respond to treatment, I could be stealing moments from them they’ll never get back. The idea pins me in place like a splinter beneath my skin.
Mummy squeezes Papa’s hand. The cabby slams the door after loading their luggage into the boot, and the sound reins me in. The sharp clatter contrasts too heavily with the quiet that will later press in at night, making every small noise jolt me in ways Ican’t yet prepare for. I can’t let those thoughts crawl beneath my walls. Not if I’m going to protect them from this.
“I love you,” I whisper, and they say it back. I shut the door and stand there, waving with a useless, limp arm as the cab pulls away towards the airport. My arm drops. Shoulders sag with mingled relief and regret as their taxi disappears around the bend.
I made it.
Despite everything thrown at me these last three weeks, from the stress ulcer I’m sure to have developed to the ache in the hollows of my chest that I haven’t managed to soothe, I bloody made it. I got through my graduation with my parents doting and neither of them suspecting that I’ve been keeping a secret. The thought that I might be saving them months of emotional agony is the small, cold justification that pushes me through the acid rising in my throat from yet another lie.
With my diploma in hand and Embershire Medical University having agreed to defer my placement in the physician associate programme until next autumn, I’m well on my way to kicking this cunt’s ass.
The cunt in question being, well, cancer.
I can’t bring myself to say the word aloud, not even to myself. It makes it feel less like a shadow and more like the enemy I plan to fight alone. I’ve decided, for them and for me, that I won’t tell anyone until I’m on the other side, or at least into remission. Telling them now would only break them, and I can’t bear the idea of them carrying that weight. My jaw tightens as I breathe shallowly, the subtle pressure echoing the dissociation that has me standing frozen on the porch.
