He got kicked out of school for dealing when he was a senior and I was a sophomore. He left one day without even saying good-bye. I found out later he’d gone to juvie. He’d been making drugs in a shed in the woods by our foster family’s house, and they’d turned him in.

And just like that, I was all alone. Not only had I lost my mom and dad, my brother was gone too.

I learned my lesson then. You can’t take anything for granted. You can’t stand by and leave things to chance. The people you love can die, and you’ll be alone. You must always be alert, ready to fight.

It was almost twelve years before I felt like I belonged again. Twelve long, lonely years before I met Nate and we had Josh and became our own family.

My thumb grazed the screen on my phone, lighting up the picture on my screen saver. Josh was in my arms, looking directly at the camera, while I had my forehead pressed to his cheek. Nate’s arms were around both of us, his chin on my head. We looked happy.

I grabbed a sheet of paper from the printer and drew a line down the middle, making two columns: incoming and outgoing. I opened the banking app on my phone and scrawled our monthly salaries in the incoming column, then did a quick tally of our bills, my medical school loan payments, and my malpractice insurance in the outgoing.

I stared at the digits as fear corkscrewed through me.

I couldn’t lose my son. We had to find the money.

I shoved my phone and the paper into my purse and slipped undetected down the hall. The radio was still murmuring, Marjorie singing tunelessly along.

In the hall heading toward reception, I noticed the supply closet was open a crack. I moved to shut it, remembering that Julia had said people kept forgetting to lock it. But something made me stop.

I pulled the door open and peered into the murky closet. There were drug samples arranged at the back. To my right, a stock of rubber gloves, tongue depressors, thermometer heads, bandages, antiseptic, blood pressure cuffs. And just beneath them, stacked on the shelf in neat piles, was the stock of prescription pads for all the clinic’s doctors.

CHAPTER 8

“JOSH HAS ACUTE MYELOID LEUKEMIA,” Dr. Palmer told Nate and me the next day.

We were sitting in his office surrounded by gleaming rows of medical degrees, shining glass awards, and framed certificates. A handful of photos of his daughter over the years sat on the window ledge behind him.