Chapter 14: The Second Fight

A Harder Kind of Hope

Dr. Li did not soften the odds this time the way she’d learned, four years earlier, to ease a family into them gradually. Relapsed high-risk neuroblastoma, she explained, carried a different weight entirely than the disease they’d fought the first time — the cells that survived the initial treatment were, by definition, the ones that had already proven resistant to it, which meant the tools left to fight them back were fewer and less reliable than anyone in that room wanted to hear.

“I’m not going to tell you this is the same fight with the same odds,” she said, sitting close the way she always had for the hardest conversations. “It isn’t. Salvage chemotherapy at this stage buys time more often than it buys a cure. I want you going into this with clear eyes about what we’re actually aiming for.”

“What are we aiming for,” Bea pressed, her voice steadier than her hands.

“More good time with her, first and honestly. A cure isn’t off the table completely, and I’ll chase it as hard as you want me to. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I let you walk in believing the odds are what they were four years ago.”

Liam sat through all of it in his usual chair, older now, tall enough that his feet no longer swung clear of the floor, listening with the same grave attention he’d given every hard conversation since he was four years old.

“I still feel her,” he said, once Dr. Li had finished. “That hasn’t changed. If it starts working, I’ll know before the scans do. And if it stops working, I’ll know that too.”

“I believe you,” Dr. Li said. “I’ve never once had reason not to.”

Étaín found her own way to the hospital chapel that evening, something she hadn’t done since the first diagnosis, and sat a long while in the empty quiet before Bea found her there, drawn by the same instinct.

“I keep thinking about Madrid’s ledger,” Étaín murmured, not turning around. “Two years of watching before she ever said a word about what she’d seen in him. I used to think that patience was the hardest part of loving somebody. I don’t think that anymore. I think this is harder. Watching him watch her, knowing exactly what it’s costing him to know what he knows.”

“Is there anything that makes it easier?” Bea asked, sitting down beside her.

“Not easier,” Étaín said. “Just familiar. We’ve stood in this exact kind of dark before, Bea. We know the shape of it now, even if we hate it.”

Round One

The first round of salvage chemotherapy hit harder than any single round from the original treatment ever had, the drugs themselves more aggressive, Cissy’s body less resilient at eight than it had been the first time, worn thin already by four years of scans and scares even during the good stretch.

She lost the hair that had only just fully grown back, and took it harder this time, oddly, than she had the first — old enough now to remember exactly what growing it back out had felt like, and grieving the loss of that hard-won progress on top of the loss of the hair itself.