Caleb
I found Becky in Micah's room early the next morning, sitting on the edge of his bed while he still slept, her eyes fixed on the rise and fall of his chest the way I'd noticed her doing more often since the parking lot ambush two days earlier. She hadn't slept well. I could see it in the shadows under her eyes, the same shadows I saw in half the parents I treated, the particular exhaustion that came from loving someone whose survival wasn't guaranteed.
"Scan results confirmed what we suspected," I said quietly, sitting down in the chair across from her, my tablet open with the images already pulled up. "We need to start a new round of consolidation chemotherapy. More aggressive than the last cycle, given how close he came to relapse."
She nodded slowly, the news landing on her the
