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The old woman nods and yawns because it’s late. Or early. I’m not sure which. “I sleep in my room. Anything changes—”
“You’ll be the second to know, right after her doctor.”
She leaves us to the business of watching and waiting.
By dawn, Sarah’s fever breaks. The cultures will take longer—they always do because bacteria will grow only so fast. The numbers turn, and the terrible climb reverses. Somewhere around four in the morning, I let myself believe she’s through the worst of it.
“She’s been improving so much,” Lupo quietly says, bewildered after being up all night. “Is this some kind of rebound reaction from her immune system?”
“I’ll look at her records. There could be something I missed.”
“I doubt that.”
“Contrary to popular belief, doctors are not infallible.”
He softly chuckles. “I only meant to say that I can’t picture you missing something.”
“Present company included, I do miss things.”
He arches a brow.
“I mean, not… not that I miss you. I only meant that if I had snooped, even just a little bit, I would have figured out the counterfeit pharmaceutical thing much faster.”
“Of course that’s what you meant.”
I ignore him and pull her recent labs and dosing to understand how this started. There it is, plain as a wrong number always is to the person trained to read it. Sarah’s been doing so well, gaining weight on Diana’s cooking, growing, thriving. All the good things.
Which means her old methotrexate dose is too low at her new weight. She outgrew her dose while everyone celebrated how well she was doing.
A clerical gap, the most ordinary medical failure there is, and it almost killed her while I was busy with dossiers, bad publicity, and my own broken heart. We fought a whole war over poisoned medicine, and the thing that nearly took her was the real medicine, correct in every way except the one number that measures how much a child has grown.
I should have caught it. Distraction is a luxury a kid like Sarah cannot afford from the adult keeping her alive. The fix is so easy it’s obscene. New weight entered, dose corrected.
I know she’ll get past this—her body is strong, the dose is fixed. She will be fine, and if she’s going to be fine, then she doesn’t need me anymore, not the way she did.
Reasons to stay vaporize, one after another.
Lupo’s gone to get breakfast or lunch or whatever meal is appropriate to the time of day, because the room is just Sarah sleeping soundly. Her coloring is good again. Her numbers are improving. I know she’s on the mend.
“Baby girl?”
No response.
I settle in at her bedside and confess how I screwed up. And why.
All of it, the backward story of how we got here, reverse chronological. No one else to tell it to, and it doesn’t excuse missing something so simple, but I need to say it to someone. A confession of the worst kind that ends with, “… and he kidnapped me. But I stayed anyway. I can’t leave you, Sarah. I don’t think I can leave any of you behind, and I hate that I don’t hate it, because I should. I should run—”
A hand closes around my wrist, and I startle hard.
Diana. She’s wheeled herself in from her own hospital room, IV pole and all, silent as she never is, and I don’t know how long she’s been there.
Her grip is gentle and absolute. She holds my wrist against the mattress, and she looks at me with all her years of understanding in her face. “My son did what?”
32
LUPO
I shouldn’t have left to get breakfast. I know that the moment I see Veda and Ma in the hallway outside of Sarah’s room.
