There was a question on all our lips. I didn’t want to ask it, because I was afraid I already knew the answer.
‘Is there… is there a cure for this thing?’
Very slowly, the doctor shook his head. ‘We know much more about it now than we did back then, and one day wewillfind a cure.’
The room fell silent. All I could hear was the thundering of my heart.
Amelia was the first to speak. ‘If all that’s true, then Dad got lucky, didn’t he?’
My head shot up like a deer who’d just heard a rifle being cocked.
‘He got to die before this thing had the chance to take him down.’
*
The rest of the meeting went by in a blur.
‘Amelia, we’ll arrange for you to speak with a counsellor, who’ll be able to help you navigate your way through the next few weeks. I’m sure there will be a great many questions you want to ask.’
‘There’s onlyoneI want an answer to right now. Lexi and I were born from the same round of IVF. Genetically, we’re almost identical. So, ifI’veinherited this fucked-up gene, does that mean she has too?’
I watched Amelia’s face as she waited for the doctor to throw me a lifeline. She wasn’t even asking about her own prognosis, or how the disease would progress; all she was thinking about was me.
‘The odds remain at fifty-fifty,’ Mr Robinson said, shooting me a sympathetic glance. ‘One sibling having the gene doesn’t affect the chances of the others getting it.’
Bile rose in my throat and for an awful moment I didn’t think I’d be able to swallow it back down.
‘Could the IVF have helped? Lexi was cryo… cryo…’ It was a bad moment for the word to have been stolen from her.
‘Cryogenically frozen,’ I said softly.
Amelia nodded gratefully. ‘Could that have killed off the faulty gene? Could that have helped protect her?’
‘I’m afraid it wouldn’t. IVF embryos are unaffected by the freezing process.’
The doctors fell silent for a moment, allowing us all to absorb their words. Amelia was the first to speak and I should have known by the look on her face that I wasn’t going to like what she was about to say.
‘Lexi, you need to get tested. You need to have the blood test done as soon as possible and find out if you have this too.’
Four heads turned in my direction. I truly didn’t know the words were even in my head, much less that they would fall from my lips with such conviction.
‘Absolutely not. I do not want to know.’
31
I stormed out of the cottage, slamming the door pointedly behind me. Ten minutes of staring with unseeing eyes at the incoming waves did little to calm me down. I heard the crunch of footsteps on the sand behind me and moments later a shadow joined mine on the beach. I didn’t turn around.
‘I’m so angry. I could throttle her.’
Tom’s wiry eyebrows rose in surprise.
‘Didn’t take you for the violent type,’ he murmured, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the top rail of the fence. I got the sense he was waiting for my rage to cool from boiling to a less homicidal simmer.
‘You might have to get used to it. Unless I can make my idiotic sister see sense, I’ll probably be like this for a while.’
‘Reckon she’s just as mad at you,’ Tom said, bending to pick up a piece of seaweed and examining it carefully, as though it held the answer to all our problems.
‘I know,’ I said, brushing a lock of windswept hair from my eyes. ‘I hate where we are right now. I’m not used to fighting with her… well, not over something this important.’
