Nate thought he saw a glimmer of a tear on her cheek, a fierce sucker punch to his gut. He suddenly felt scared. Emma never cried. She was self-contained, self-reliant. He didn’t know what it would mean if she fell apart.

“It’s not your fault,” he murmured.

“The bruises… I’m a doctor!”

“Em…” Sometimes she was her own worst enemy.

She whirled on him, her eyes blazing, raw with pain, but Dr. Palmer interjected, “Your husband’s right. Those bruises could’ve been anything. It’s easy to miss the symptoms at first. Being a doctor had nothing to do with it. You know how these things go, and that your life is about to change. With luck, we’ve caught it early, and can start treatment right away.”

He was sharp and focused, giving them a sense of what they were dealing with and how to fight it. Nate liked that about him.

Nate cleared his throat. “Does Josh need chemo?”

Dr. Palmer looked at him, his eyes flicking up and down, as if assessing Nate’s character. “First we’ll need to do a bone marrow test to confirm our diagnosis.”

“You don’t know.…” Hope burst in Nate’s chest.

“We do know that it’s leukemia,” Dr. Palmer said patiently. The kind but firm manner in which he said it spoke to his experience. “We found blast cells in Josh’s blood. Based on the blood tests, we suspect that it’s acute myeloid leukemia.”

He went on to describe leukemia subtypes and consolidation therapy and bone marrow transplant, the likely outcomes and possibilities. His words knifed Nate in the lungs. His brain clouded, his eyes blurring. He nodded over and over, pretending that he understood, when he only wanted to know one thing: “What are Josh’s chances of survival?”

Dr. Palmer hesitated. “We won’t know for certain until we have the test results back. However, acute myeloid leukemia is very aggressive and requires quick decision-making.”

Nate closed his eyes. He could hear the clock above the door ticking. It seemed to have gotten louder. How long had they been in here? How long did Josh have left?

Emma’s hand snaked over to his, winding her fingers through his. Her hand was ice-cold. He squeezed it and drew an X on her palm with his index finger.

“There is one other treatment we could do,” Dr. Johnson spoke up from where he’d been standing silently near the door.

“What is it?” Nate looked between the men. When they didn’t answer he looked at Emma, but she seemed as clueless as he felt.

The tick-tock of the clock suddenly grew more insistent.

“Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy. Or CAR T-cell therapy,” Dr. Palmer finally said. “It’s a type of immunotherapy that’s been approved to treat children and young adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Recently it has shown some impressive results treating acute myeloid leukemia.”