The man’s suspicious tone sent heat rising up Juan’s neck. It was as if this rent-a-cop expected Juan to be emptying the trash cans instead of sitting in front of a lab bench.

“Excuse me?” Juan snapped indignantly. “I happen to work here.”

The security guard frowned. “Sir, where’s your employee badge?”

Juan rotated in his seat, unclipped the badge from the lab coat he had draped on the back of his chair, and wordlessly held it up for the man to see.

The guard nodded. “Thank you, sir. I’m just doing the rounds.” He turned and walked out of the lab.

Juan scowled. He knew the guard was just doing his job, but he couldn’t help but wonder if the man would have been as brusque if Juan’s skin hadn’t been brown.

Juan had long ago understood just how lucky he was. Not only had he managed to escape the projects of East LA—a rare feat—but he had completed both college and medical school, and now here he was doing cancer research for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

He looked at the picture of his mother he kept on his lab bench. She’d gotten pregnant with him when she was very young, and as a result, she’d never had the chance to build her own career. But she’d dedicated herself to being the best mother Juan could have hoped for. And it was she who instilled in him the idea that education was the only way out of the projects.

With a dull ache crawling up his neck, Juan felt the beginning of a headache.

He’d had a hard life—and it got even harder when Juan’s father died. Juan was thirteen, and his mother was pregnant with Miguel, when one day Dad simply fainted on the living room floor. He’d been suffering from what everyone assumed was a hard-to-shake flu.

His father was only thirty-one years old when he died.

Juan still remembered the smell of the exhaust coming from the heavy traffic as Mom followed the ambulance. She had one hand on the steering wheel, the other patting his shoulder reassuringly as she said, “Mijo, it’ll be all right.”

It wasn’t all right.

Dad never regained consciousness.

It was late on a Sunday evening, over eighteen years ago, when Juan first heard the word “cancer.”

Juan heard the tremor in her voice as she repeatedly whispered a prayer to a God he wasn’t sure existed.

After that, Juan began lashing out in school, arguing with his teachers, getting into fights. Impotently venting his rage at everyone around him. He was angry at his father for not having gone to the doctor earlier.

He was a teenager who’d lost a parent. He was just… angry.