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Chapter 6
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Before I Forget His Name Chapter 10
Eighteen months later, my scans were still stable.My memory never came all the way back. Sometimes I forgot the ending of a movie I had watched that morning. Sometimes Thursday became Tuesday in my head. I stopped being ashamed of reminders on my phone, and I stopped treating every missing detail as proof that I was disappearing.Every six weeks, a scan still decided whether we could breathe. On those mornings, Roman and I had the same rule: no predictions in the waiting room. We argued about terrible television, ranked the vending-machine snacks, and planned dinner as if the results had no authority over the next few hours.Roman learned to cook three edible breakfasts. He also learned to ask, whenever the urge to take over hit him, “Do you want advice, or do you want me to listen?”Sienna became legal counsel for the Pier Seven Foundation. When Elias got engaged, Roman sent him a case of twenty-five-year-old Scotch, though he still refused to admit he had ever been jealous of him.W
Before I Forget His Name Chapter 9
Three months later, Roman and I returned to New York for my follow-up scan.The DeLuca estate had changed. The gardenia greenhouse in the east wing hadn’t been rebuilt; an open lawn covered the site. My room no longer looked like a girl’s bedroom preserved under glass. The family monitoring terminal was gone from the wall, and the door had an ordinary electronic lock with a code only I knew.Nora hugged me with tears in her eyes, then released me quickly, afraid of hurting me.Luca waited on the front steps with a new set of deeds to Pier Seven. Roman hadn’t merely returned my assets. He had recovered the shipping insurance rights my parents had been forced to surrender years ago.“The Don says this is restitution, not a gift,” Luca told me.“Where is he?”“In the underground conference room. The final hearing on the ambush is today.”I didn’t go downstairs.In the past, I would have waited for Roman to fix everything and pieced together the truth from scraps other people let slip. Thi
Before I Forget His Name Chapter 8
After the first round of vaccine treatment, the MRI showed that the tumor site was stable.I wasn’t cured. We had only borrowed time from death without being told when it had to be returned.I moved out of the hospital and into Roman’s apartment. We took separate bedrooms, and he kept his rule about never knocking after nine. Every morning, he wrote the day’s plan on the whiteboard in the kitchen: medication, physical therapy, a walk, and one small thing that had nothing to do with cancer.Monday, we fed swans by the lake.Tuesday, he learned to make oatmeal that didn’t taste like the Atlantic Ocean.On Wednesday, he took me onto a Zurich tram and deliberately put me in charge of the route. I led us off at the wrong stop. We wandered through an unfamiliar neighborhood and found a restaurant with no English menu, where Roman ordered by pointing and accidentally asked for three desserts.He ate all three rather than admit the mistake. The waiter clearly recognized him from the internatio
Before I Forget His Name Chapter 7
The tumor board gave me two choices.I could continue standard treatment. The side effects were predictable, but the chance of recurrence was brutally high. Or I could join an early-stage personalized vaccine trial that required another tissue sample and carried the risk of a severe immune reaction.“I want the trial,” I said.Roman sat on my right and didn’t interrupt.Dr. Weiss turned to him. “As her family, do you have an opinion?”“She isn’t an extension of me,” Roman said. “Her opinion is the decision. I’m here to make sure she has heard every risk.”He waited until we were alone in the elevator before asking, “Are you scared?”“Yes.”“So am I.”There was no false promise, no Don’s order that he would save me because the world obeyed him. His honesty steadied me more than certainty would have.In the third week of treatment, Luca called from New York. Someone inside the Caruso family had used the canceled wedding to launch a revolt, and the conspirators had dug up the old accounts
Before I Forget His Name Chapter 6
The pathology report was worse than anyone had expected.The surgeons had removed most of what they could see, but the cancer had already spread along the nerve fibers. I would need six weeks of radiation and chemotherapy before the doctors could decide whether I still qualified for the vaccine trial.Roman canceled every public appearance in New York and handed the daily family business to Luca. He rented an ordinary apartment across from the hospital and arrived with breakfast at seven every morning. At nine each night, he left without asking to enter my private room.His food was terrible.The first time, he mistook salt for sugar and ruined the oatmeal. The second, an entire uncut onion floated in his chicken soup. On the third morning, I lost patience and asked a nurse to tell him there was a cafeteria downstairs.The next day, he arrived with a brand-new cookbook. A yellow note was stuck to the cover.[A Don can be trained.]I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing.There was n
Before I Forget His Name Chapter 5
At four in the morning, Dr. Weiss brought in her team to explain the operation.The tumor had wrapped itself around pathways that controlled language and memory. To preserve as much function as possible, they would wake me during the removal and ask me to name pictures and recognize familiar faces. If the bleeding couldn’t be stopped or the swelling became too severe, I might never wake again.“You need to name a postoperative contact,” the nurse said.I meant to write Elias, but the pen stopped above the paper. Through the narrow glass panel in the door, Roman sat on a hard chair in the corridor. The Don of the DeLuca family never waited for anyone, yet he had been there for seven hours without allowing a single call into my room.I wrote down Dr. Weiss.Roman saw the form leave the room and asked no questions.Before they wheeled me away, he put something old in my palm. It wasn’t a ring or a DeLuca token, only a subway token worn smooth at the edges.“When you were eighteen, you sli
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