Chapter eight

The carpet was red, which people always found significant.

I had walked red carpets eleven times in five years, and I knew exactly how to do it: the angle of the shoulders, the specific degree of smile that read as warmth without being eager, the way to pause at the right moments so the photographers got their shot without feeling like they were chasing you. I knew how to make it look effortless because I had practiced effortlessness the way other people practiced scales.

"Sloane!" The voices came from all directions, overlapping and urgent. "Sloane, over here! Sloane, can you look left? Sloane, who are you wearing?"

I turned, smiled, turned again.

The cameras were a wall of white light and I moved through them the way you move through weather, present and unbothered and already thinking about something else.

"Sloane Vale, five films, three major awards, and the critics are already calling this one the performance of the decade." The interviewer materialized at my elbow with her microphone and her practiced warmth. "How does that feel?"

"Premature," I said, which made her laugh the way I'd known it would. "Ask me after the reviews."

"Modest. I love it." She leaned in slightly, dropping her voice to the register that signaled a more personal question. "And how are you? Outside of all this? There's been a lot of speculation about your personal life—"

"There always is," I said pleasantly. "I find it's best not to feed it."

Another smile, another turn, and I moved on before she could follow up.

The trick with personal questions was not to shut them down hard, which created a story, but to answer them so cleanly and briefly that there was nothing to print. I had gotten very good at this, and I had gotten very good at a lot of things in five years.

Maya appeared at my side as I reached the entrance. "You have the cast photo in six minutes," she said quietly. "Director's table for dinner after the screening, and your car is confirmed for ten thirty."

"Thank you."

"Also—" Maya hesitated, which she almost never did. "There was a message from Nina. About Jake."

I kept walking. "What did she say?"

"His fever is up again, one-oh-two point four. She gave him the medication but she thought you should know."

I took my phone from my clutch without breaking stride, checked the message from Nina myself, read it twice, noted the timestamp, and put the phone away.

"Tell her I'll call at ten," I said. "And ask her to send me his temperature every hour until then."

"Of course."

We reached the cast, and I arranged my face into something that looked like presence and stepped into the photographs.

The screening lasted two hours and fourteen minutes.

I sat in the third row, in the dark, and watched myself on a screen the size of a building. There was always something disorienting about this, about watching the face she had built and the voice she had shaped and the stillness she had practiced, moving through scenes she remembered filming in cold and rain and artificial light. The person on screen was completely convincing, and she always was.

When the credits rolled and the lights came up, the applause started before I'd finished a breath. I stood when the director gestured for me to stand, accepted the sound of it the way you accept weather, and thought about Jake's temperature.

One-oh-two point four.

It had been one-oh-one three days ago, and she'd thought it was a virus, and Nina had thought the same thing two weeks before that, and the pediatrician had agreed, and everyone had agreed, and the fever had come back anyway.

"Magnificent," the director said into my ear over the noise. "I told you. I told you this was the one."

"You did," I agreed, and smiled at him, and accepted the glass of champagne someone put in my hand and didn't drink it.

I left at 10:15, slipping out through the side entrance before the after-party had fully assembled. This was not unusual, as Sloane Vale was known for being difficult to hold onto at events, for being present and attentive and then simply gone, which people interpreted as mystique and which was actually just a mother who needed to make a phone call.

The car was warm, the partition was up, and I called Nina before the door had closed.

"He's sleeping," Nina said, which was the first thing. "Temperature came down a little, 101.8, and he had some soup."

"And Julie?"

"Fine. She drew you something, and she made me promise to tell you it's a dragon, not a dog."

Something eased slightly in my chest. "Tell her I could tell," I said. "I'll be home by eleven."

I put the phone in my lap and looked out the window at the city going past, Portland at night, the bridges lit, the river moving dark and steady underneath them.

Five years and I still wasn't tired of it.

The apartment was quiet when I let myself in.

Nina was asleep on the couch with a blanket pulled up to her chin, which she always denied doing and always did. I covered her properly and went down the hall to the twins' room.

They were both asleep, Jake on his side with his breathing slightly heavier than it should have been, one arm flung over his face the way he'd slept since he was an infant, and Julie on her back, perfectly composed, somehow already managing to look like a person with opinions even unconscious.

I stood in the doorway for a long moment, watching them breathe.

Then I went to the kitchen table where Julie had left the drawings, weighted down with a crayon so they wouldn't slide, two pieces of paper in the particular bold lines of a four year old who doesn't yet know to doubt herself.

The first was the dragon, which did look somewhat like a dog but had a convincingly fierce expression, and the second was a figure with long dark hair and a smaller figure on either side of her, all three of them holding hands, the sky above them full of yellow circles that might have been stars or might have been suns, Julie having not yet settled on the distinction.

I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet, still in the dress, the premiere somewhere behind me in another world.

Jake's fever had come back four times in six weeks.

I had been telling myself each time that it was normal, that children got fevers, that the pediatrician wasn't worried, that I was catastrophizing because I was a person who had learned that good things could disappear without warning and so my nervous system had never fully stood down. But I had also been watching him, the way he tired faster than Julie, the way his color wasn't quite right some mornings, the way he'd asked me last week with the particular directness of a four-year-old why he always felt so heavy.

I picked up my phone and opened the notes app where I'd been keeping track of dates, temperatures, symptoms, and looked at the list. It was longer than I'd let myself acknowledge.

I called Dr. Hana at eleven forty-seven at night because she had told me to call when I was worried, and I was worried.

She answered on the third ring, which told me she'd been expecting it.

"The fever pattern," I said. "And the fatigue, and the pallor. I've been watching it for six weeks and I think you need to see him tomorrow and not next week."

A pause, the kind a good doctor uses when she is being careful.

"Bring him in at 8," she said. "We'll run a full panel."

"What are you thinking?"

Another pause, shorter this time.

"Let's see the bloods first," she said. "Try to sleep, Brynn."

She was the only person in Portland who called me that.

I sat on the kitchen floor for a while longer after the call ended, the drawings in my lap, and then I folded them carefully, put them in my clutch next to the phone, stood up, and went to bed.

I did not sleep for a long time.

The results came back two days later.

Dr. Hana sat across the desk from me with her hands folded and the particular steadiness of someone who has delivered difficult news before and knows that the most important thing she can offer is stillness.

She explained it in careful, precise language, the type of anemia, what it meant for how Jake's body was functioning, what it would require to treat.

I listened to all of it, asked the right questions in the right order, and wrote things down.

"The bone marrow transplant," I said. "What are his odds with a good match?"

"Significantly better. The closer the match, the better the outcome."

"And without one?"

Dr. Hana looked at me steadily. "The condition will progress. There are other interventions, but a matched donor gives him the best chance of a full recovery."

"Who do we test first?"

"Immediate biological family. Siblings are the strongest candidates, and parents are the next step."

Julie, of course. I would have Julie tested immediately.

"And if there's no match in the family?"

"We go to the registry. It takes time, but we start immediately."

I nodded and wrote that down too.

The appointment ended, and I walked to the car and sat in the driver's seat for four minutes with my hands on the wheel and the engine off.

Then I thought about what the doctor had said.

Immediate biological family.

Julie first, Julie who shared everything with her brother, who had come into the world seven minutes after him and had been fiercely, devotedly beside him ever since.

I hated that it had to be Julie, she’s just a child. Unless I went back to—

I couldn’t finish the thought, not yet.