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“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No,” I whispered. “It isn’t.”
I held her face between my hands.
“I don’t know everything that will happen. But the doctors believe they can treat this, and we are going to stay with you through every part of it.”
Her first chemotherapy cycle began three days later.
Daniel slept in the reclining chair beside her bed. Eric brought breakfast every morning, even when Sophie could not eat it. I learned to measure time by medications, blood tests, and the changing numbers on Dr. Shah’s reports.
A detective returned during Sophie’s treatment.
He told us the medical findings and Sophie’s consistent statements provided no basis for a criminal case against Daniel. The hospital social worker documented that no pregnancy had been found.
Daniel was officially cleared.
But innocence on paper did not erase the parents who had already whispered his name in the school parking lot.
“I can handle it,” he told me.
I knew he was lying.
After the first treatment cycle, Sophie’s nausea worsened. She slept most of the day and cried when strands of hair began collecting on her pillow.
Then Dr. Shah entered holding a laboratory report.
For the first time since we met her, she smiled before speaking.
“Sophie’s hCG has begun to fall.”
I looked at the page. The number was still far above normal.
“How much does that mean?”
“It means the tumor is responding.”
Sophie touched the bandage covering her IV.
“So the thing in my brain is getting weaker?”
“That is what we hope.”
She reached beneath her blanket and pulled out the stuffed rabbit.
“Then it should be scared.”
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