Chapter 8: The Readout

The final scans were pushed to September, and the blue folder was pushed with them.

Every few weeks I asked Alasdair, and every few weeks he found a new reason.

A shipment was late. A patient had a fever. The scanner at the hospital was down.

I let him, because I was busy and happy and slightly afraid of why he kept putting it off.

On the second Thursday of September, at four in the afternoon, the whole lab stood in a half circle around one monitor.

Twelve patients had started the trial.

Franklin's compound was in all of them, and so was a year of our nights.

The radiologist's assistant read the scans out over the speakerphone.

"Patient one, no visible lesion."

Nobody moved.

"Patient two. No visible lesion."

My nails bit into my palms under my crossed arms, where nobody could see.

"Patient seven. No visible lesion."

The oldest of the techs reached for my elbow without looking at me.

"Patient ten."

"Patient eleven," the voice said. "Remission confirmed. Patient twelve, remission confirmed."

For a moment the lab was silent.

Then the noise broke, and a student screamed, and someone knocked a rack of tubes onto the floor, and nobody picked it up.

Twelve out of twelve.

Pancreatic cancer had killed Franklin in fourteen months, and it had killed my mother when I was nineteen.

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