Chapter 5

He called the Harlow Institute that night. I know because I was still awake at midnight, staring at the strip of light under my hospital room door, when I heard his voice in the corridor, low and insistent and not taking no for an answer.

I lay in the dark and I listened to someone fight for my life harder than I had been willing to fight for it myself.

Something about that wrecked me in a completely different way.

I was discharged two days later with paperwork, a referral letter, and a list of instructions from Dr. Joel that he had written out by hand on the back of an appointment card because he didn't trust me to remember it otherwise.

He drove me to my apartment.

We sat outside for a moment in the parked car.

"Are you going to be alright alone tonight?" he asked.

"I don't have much choice."

"That's not what I asked."

I looked at him. He was watching me with that careful, steady attention that I had come to recognize as specifically his. Like whatever I said, he was actually going to hear it.

"No," I admitted. "Probably not. But I'll get through it."

He nodded slowly. "Call me if it gets too bad."

"Joel, you're my doctor, you don't have to—"

"Call me." The way he said it was simple and final.

I got out of the car.

The apartment felt smaller at night. The mattress on the floor, the bare window, the walls that held no memory of me yet. I sat on the mattress and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and looked at nothing for a while.

My phone buzzed.

Justin.

Did you take the kitchen scissors? I can't find them.

I read it twice.

The kitchen scissors.

Not: I heard you were in the hospital again. Not: Are you okay. The kitchen scissors.

I put the phone face down on the mattress.

Then I picked it up again and I did something I had been putting off for two days. I opened my contacts and I scrolled to the name I had been pretending wasn't there.

Mom.

She lived four hours away. We had never been close in the easy, comfortable way that some mothers and daughters were close, but she was the only family I had left and tonight, alone on a mattress on the floor with nothing but bare walls and the particular silence of a place that didn't know you yet, I missed her in a way that was physical.

I didn't call.

I put the phone down again.

Some griefs were too complicated to explain at midnight.

Monday came like a door I had to walk through whether I was ready or not.

The Harlow Institute was forty minutes outside the city. Glass and pale stone, gardens that were too beautiful for a medical facility, the whole place carrying the particular quiet of somewhere that took what it did very seriously.

I stood in the lobby with my duffel bag and my intake forms and the referral letter and I looked around and I tried to locate something inside me that felt like hope.

It wasn't quite there yet.

But something else was. Something quieter. A kind of low, stubborn heat. The type that doesn't announce itself but doesn't go out either.

"Harper Wells?"

A young woman was crossing the lobby toward me. Bright eyes, clipboard, sensible shoes. Wells. I had filed the paperwork from the hospital bed. It was the first decision I had made for myself in longer than I could remember. Not Harper Johnson. Not Justin's wife. Not the sick one, the burden, the woman his friend group quietly felt sorry for.

Harper Wells. Just me.

"I'm Audrey," she said, extending her hand. "Dr. Reeves' coordinator. We're so glad you decided to come."

She had no idea how close I had come to not coming. How many times in the last forty-eight hours I had almost talked myself out of this. How I had sat on that mattress at three in the morning and run the numbers and the logic and come up with a hundred reasons why a woman who was already this broken shouldn't bother rebuilding.

"Thank you," I said.

She led me through glass corridors and pale rooms and I followed and tried to breathe.

Dr. Reeves was compact and silver-haired and had reading glasses she kept removing and replacing like she was punctuating her own thoughts with them. She looked at my file for a full ninety seconds without speaking before she looked up at me.

"Your last scan is alarming," she said.

"I know."

"The progression rate is faster than ideal for this protocol."

"I know that too."

She studied me over her glasses. "Dr. Joel tells me you're a fighter."

I thought about the floor of the locked bedroom. The floor of the empty apartment. The hospital ceiling. All the floors I had been on lately.

"I'm working on it," I said.

Something in her face settled. Decided.

"This treatment is not gentle," she said. "There will be days it is harder than the illness. You will want to quit. People in far better physical condition than you are right now have wanted to quit." She set my file down. "What do you do when you want to quit?"

I thought about Justin's voice. She doesn't have the spine to make things difficult.

I thought about Vivian on my couch. I thought about divorce papers on my coffee table. I thought about blood on a floor in an empty apartment and crying alone at a hospital ceiling.

I thought about Dr. Joel, awake at midnight in a corridor, fighting for me when I had stopped fighting for myself.

"I think about what I'm going to look like on the other side of this," I said. "I think about coming back as someone nobody saw coming."

Dr. Reeves looked at me for a long moment.

Then she put her glasses back on and opened a new folder.

"We start tomorrow," she said.