2 AM

Stetson was already in the hallway when I opened my door.

He was dressed in his basketball shorts and an old tournament shirt, with his hair flattened on one side. He held his phone in his hand, but he wasn’t looking at it; he was focused on me. The hallway light was off, and the only illumination came from under Dad and Pops’ door at the end of the hall, indicating that someone was already awake, which meant I hadn’t been as quiet as I thought.

“How long?” he asked.

“I don’t know. A while.”

He glanced at my left leg. I was shifting my weight differently, and he noticed, just like twins do before they even fully process it. “How bad?”

“Bad enough.”

That was all it took. He turned and knocked on Dad and Pops’ door, two knocks, and pushed it open.

The ER at 2 AM was a whole different world. It was fluorescent and cold, moving at two different speeds, urgent in some areas and slow in others. The waiting area was filled with people who all wore the same expression, that particular glaze of someone who had been there long enough to stop expecting anything to happen anytime soon. I had been in ERs before, for a sprained ankle in sophomore year and Stetson’s broken wrist in eighth grade, but those felt like mere inconveniences. This felt different. It felt like the building knew something I didn’t.

They took me back quicker than I anticipated. The triage nurse checked my temperature, examined my leg, and made a note that got us through the door in under twenty minutes, which Dad later told me was significant.

The exam bay had a curtain instead of a door, a paper sheet on the bed that crinkled every time I moved, and a TV mounted high on the wall that nobody turned on. Pops stood at the foot of the bed with his arms crossed, not in an impatient way, but in a way that showed he needed to be doing something with his hands, and standing was the closest option. Dad sat in the plastic chair next to the bed, holding my hand, which he hadn’t done since I was maybe ten, and I let him, which I also hadn’t done since then.

Dr. Danielson was younger than I thought he would be, moving through the room with the efficiency of someone who knew how to avoid wasting time. He asked me questions in a calm and specific order: when did the pain begin, where exactly is it, has it changed at all, have you had any recent illnesses, or any fever? I answered all of his questions. I didn’t mention that I had been downplaying the pain for three weeks.

He pressed gently on my thigh, just above the knee, and when he found the spot, I couldn’t help but show my discomfort. He noticed this but didn’t say anything about it.

“We’re going to start you on fluids and give you something to reduce the fever,” he explained. “And I want to get a CBC and an X-ray of your leg.”

“What are you looking for?” Dad asked.

Dr. Danielson hesitated for just a moment before responding. That brief pause felt significant. “A few things. Let’s see what the images reveal first.”

The IV was inserted on the second attempt, in the back of my left hand, and the cold saline flowed up my arm, making me focus on the ceiling. The ceiling had a water stain shaped like something I couldn’t quite figure out. I stared at it while the nurse secured the IV line and tried to think of absolutely nothing, a skill I had been honing over the past three weeks and was getting better at.

At some point, Pops moved to the chair beside me and placed his hand over mine on the bed rail, just resting it there. He didn’t say a word. That was his way of expressing everything he couldn’t articulate.

The X-ray took about ten minutes. I lay still while the technician adjusted the equipment, telling me not to breathe, then to breathe again, and the machine glided over my leg with a sound like a decision being made, and then it was over, and I was back in the bay with the crinkly paper, the water-stained ceiling, and my dads on either side of me.

We waited. That was the part nobody mentioned about the ER: how much time was spent just waiting. The fluids dripped. The fever reducer began to take effect, that specific feeling of skin that was too warm starting to loosen. Dad still held my hand. Stetson was in the waiting room, and I kept thinking about that, my brother sitting in a plastic chair under the fluorescent lights at three in the morning, and I forced myself to stop thinking about it because it wasn’t helpful.

Dr. Danielson returned with a tablet.

I focused on Dad’s face first. That was my go-to before I looked at anything else, because Dad’s expression would reveal what I was about to hear even before the doctor spoke. Dad’s face was cautious. Too cautious. The kind of cautious that was just another way of saying scared.

“The CBC shows some elevated LDH,” Dr. Danielson explained. “That’s a protein that can indicate a few different things, so I want to clarify that it’s not diagnostic by itself.” He turned the tablet toward us. The X-ray was gray, white, and black, my femur looking pale against the darker tissue, and there was a shape on it that didn’t belong. “There’s a mass here, about two inches wide, on the left femur. Again, I want to be careful because there are several possibilities for what this could be. A benign tumor. A localized infection. There are explanations that aren’t serious.”

He was careful. He was very careful. His words were precise, measured, and exactly right.

But it wasn’t careful enough.

“But,” Dad said.

“But considering the combination of findings, the fever, the elevated LDH, and the location and appearance of the mass, I’ve contacted Children’s Hospital Colorado.” Dr. Danielson placed the tablet down. “I’ve made a referral to their seventh floor. The Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders.”

The Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders.

I repeated it to myself twice, like when you say something over to ensure you heard it correctly. The words formed and then reshaped themselves, remaining unchanged.

Pops made a sound. It was low and barely heard, the kind of noise that comes out when you’re trying to stay quiet. I had never heard him make that sound before, and I avoided looking at him because I knew that if I did, I wouldn’t be able to keep it all together.

“The referral doesn’t mean a diagnosis,” Dr. Danielson explained, still calm and careful. “It means the right people need to take a look at this. They’ll reach out to you within twenty-four hours to set up a consultation.”

“What do we do tonight?” Dad asked. His voice was steady, and I could tell how much that steadiness cost him.

“Tonight, we’ll finish the fluids, lower the fever, and send you home with instructions. Rest, avoid any heavy activity, and come back right away if the pain gets significantly worse.” He looked directly at me then, not at Dad or Pops. Just me. “You’ve been dealing with this for a while, haven’t you?”

It wasn’t really a question.

“A few weeks,” I replied.

He nodded, as if he had anticipated that. “Try to get some sleep tonight.”

He left, and the curtain closed behind him, leaving the bay quiet except for the IV drip and the constant background noise of the hospital—machines humming and the movement of other people’s emergencies.

Dad stood up and walked toward the window. But there was no window. Instead, he walked to the wall and paused there for a moment, his back to us. His shoulders moved once, just once, in a way that was neither a breath nor anything else. Then he turned around, and his expression was the one he wore in courtrooms, and I realized he was using every tool he had.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Pops got up and walked over to him, placing a hand on the back of his neck. They stood there for a moment, their foreheads nearly touching, while I stared at the water stain on the ceiling, trying to memorize its shape.

The waiting room felt just as cold and fluorescent as any other, but it was louder, with chairs lined up in rows that nobody was sitting in properly. I entered through the door between Dad and Pops, still carrying the faint chemical scent of the IV tape on my hand, and I spotted Stetson before I noticed anyone else.

He was in the far corner, elbows resting on his knees, gazing at the floor. He looked up when we walked in, and the look on his face was fleeting; it changed to something more neutral almost instantly, but I saw it. Whatever he had been feeling for the last hour and a half, alone in this room, was visible in that brief moment.

Jake had his hand on Stetson’s shoulder.

Chandler was standing nearby.

I halted.

No one had called them. Dad had his phone with him the entire time, and so did Pops, yet neither had made a call that I was aware of. This meant Stetson must have called them, which indicated my brother had sat in this waiting room by himself for maybe twenty minutes before deciding he couldn’t handle it anymore and picked up his phone.

Something shattered inside me. Quietly, without any drama, like how things break when they are real.

Jake walked over to us and hugged Dad first, then Pops, and finally pulled me into his side without saying anything at first. His arm felt solid around my shoulders, and I leaned into him for just a moment before I straightened up.

“You okay?” he asked, his voice directed at the top of my head.

“Define okay.”

He made a sound that was almost a laugh and then let me go.

Chandler hadn’t shifted from his spot. He was dressed in dark sweatpants and a hoodie that seemed like it had been hastily picked up from the floor, his faux hawk completely out of place, hair flat, and he was watching me with those cerulean eyes of his in a way that felt more like a presence than pressure. He didn’t utter a word.

That was just right.

I didn’t speak either. I glanced at him for a moment before looking away, and the back of my throat tightened in a way I wasn’t going to address, not here, not in this waiting room at four in the morning.

Dad began to explain things to Jake in a quiet tone, the calm attorney version, laying out facts, findings, and what would happen next. Pops had his hand resting on Stetson’s shoulder now, and Stetson was listening to Dad with his jaw clenched, the way it did when he was dealing with something he didn’t want to face.

I took a seat in one of the plastic chairs because my leg was aching and I was exhausted, and the adrenaline that had carried me through the last couple of hours was finally fading. The chair felt cold against my joggers. The fluorescent lights were just as they had been when we entered.

Chandler settled into the chair next to mine. Not across from me, but right next to me. He didn’t mention the doctor, the results, or anything at all. He just sat there, elbow resting on his knee, and that was it.

I thought about the seventh floor. The Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders.

I thought about the shape on the X-ray that I couldn’t stop picturing since the moment the doctor turned the tablet toward us.

I thought about Stetson making that call. My brother in this room alone, sitting in this exact chair or one similar, deciding he needed someone here.

Outside the waiting room windows, the parking lot was empty, bathed in orange light, and completely normal. The world out there had no clue.

Neither did I, not really. Not yet.