He hugged and fussed over that boy. He’d sweep him up in his arms as soon as he arrived to look after him, while his son was getting ready to go to work. He’d bury his face in the boy’s soft neck, tickle him with his stubble, and say things like: “Boy, are we gonna have an adventure today!” And sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, he’d catch his son, frozen in the kitchen doorway, lunch pack and thermos in hand, looking at them both. And Max knew he’d be wondering why Max had never been like that with him when he was growing up. Max knew it probably hurt his son, but he was no more able to stop himself hugging his grandson like that than he was able to piss in a continuous stream these days.

Max would lay down his life for the boy. Cheap, clichéd sentiments and yet for him, so very real. The thought of the boy suffering in any way, if there were a chance Max could have taken on that suffering himself, would make living unbearable. What should have been purely the reflections of a hardworking man approaching retirement, sentiments mulled but not put to the test, had become strangely topical. Max was starting to think it was a fated thing.

Because the boy was about to suffer—a lot. There was a chance he was going to die. And if he were to die, it would leave Max behind on this earth still, wondering if there were anything he might have done or given up to prevent it.

One month ago, Max and his son had found out the boy, their boy, had leukemia. First there’d been the bruising, which they’d put down to the rough-and-tumble of childhood. But the bruises had been slow to go. And quick on their heels had come the tiredness. Not the tiredness of a boy who’d run and played and stayed up late for a whole weekend but a deep tiredness, a tiredness that seemed to infuse his very spirit, making it an effort to pack his bag and get in the car to go to school. Then the tests had started.

For some unfathomable reason, Max had started to get an awfully bad feeling. He’d asked his son whether he had decent health coverage. His son had said they had the basics, but times were a little tough. Their house, like many houses in Detroit, had been a stretch to buy but was now foundering in the doldrums of negative equity. The Petrovskys were a family of hardworking souls but not of wealth. Blue-collar immigrants who had settled in Detroit in the boom years and taken pride in their tiny but tangible contribution to their adopted homeland’s economy.