CHAPTER 44

BACK IN JOSH’S ROOM, I asked Jodie to grab me a coffee. After she’d gone, I sat next to Josh and watched him sleep. I traced his face with my eyes. He was so thin now, I could see the sharp ridges of his cheekbones, the point of his chin. His skin was milk pale, translucent, the tiny veins stark just beneath. His eyes moved under hairless eyelids and he stirred, bringing a hand to his shoulder before relaxing into sleep again.

I pulled my father’s poker chip out of my pocket and rolled it over my knuckles, the way Dr. Palmer had taught me when I was a teenager.

“Use your thumb to push the coin across the back of your finger, then raise your middle finger and push the side of the coin down so it flips onto the back of your middle finger,” he’d said.

Sometimes when he visited, I couldn’t understand why he bothered. I was a morose girl, lonely and insecure. And yet he continued visiting, every two weeks, like clockwork.

I’d asked him once why he kept coming. “There’s a Chinese proverb that says, if you save a life, you’re responsible for that life. I found you, Emma. A piece of you is in me now. I’m responsible for you.”

That’s when he’d pulled the coin from his pocket and showed me how to roll it over my fingers. “I taught this to my daughter when she was about your age,” he’d said.

A sharp rap came at the door, and Dr. Palmer peeked in.

Speak of the devil, I thought wryly, slipping the poker chip into my pocket.

“How’s our boy?” he asked softly.

“You tell me.”

He crossed to the monitors attached to Josh’s small body and read one of the printouts.

“He’s looking really good, Emma.” Dr. Palmer pressed his stethoscope to Josh’s chest, so smoothly that Josh didn’t even wake up. “Our ultimate goal was to avoid any organ toxicity, and the systemic corticosteroid use has worked really well to do that and to reverse the symptoms of the cytokine release syndrome without compromising his immunotherapy.”

He listened to Josh’s chest for a minute, then spoke softly to me. “We’ll continue monitoring him closely for infections and fluid imbalances, and we’ll do daily echocardiograms to monitor ejection fraction and ventricular wall mobility. I don’t want to promise he’s out of the woods yet, but I think we can feel positive now.”

Jodie entered with my coffee just then and handed me a cinnamon roll.