All Chapters of Before I Forget His Name: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The next morning, I woke on the bedroom rug with no memory of how I’d gotten there.Three alarms were waiting on my phone.[Take levetiracetam.][Meet Elias.][Do not tell Roman.]I had written the last one myself, but I stared at it for almost a minute before the meaning clicked into place.By ten, a landscaping crew was dismantling the white gardenia greenhouse outside the east wing. Roman had walked out of a family summit on my eighteenth birthday and ordered it built before sunrise. Now workers carried the last potted tree onto a truck while crates of Sienna’s burgundy ranunculus went into the ballroom.I wasn’t destroying anything. I was clearing space that no longer belonged to me.That afternoon, I met Elias at a quiet restaurant in SoHo. He came from an old Boston political family and was, in Roman’s eyes, the perfect choice: clean, safe, and far enough from the DeLuca world that I wouldn’t be dragged into it.Elias put down his menu the moment he saw me. “You look worse than y

The aircraft door sealed as the message ended.Roman called seventeen more times. On the last one, a flight attendant stopped beside my seat and politely reminded me to turn off my phone.I powered it down.[If he canceled because I’m sick, leaving is still the right thing.] Guilt wasn’t love, and gratitude wasn’t supposed to become a life sentence.Ten hours later, the plane landed in Zurich. A medical coordinator sent by Dr. Weiss met me outside customs. I had barely settled into the car when the basic phone rang.Unknown number. New York area code.I let it ring.As the car entered the hospital’s underground drive, the phantom smell of burning wood filled my nose. The driver’s voice stretched and warped. I tried to tell him the medication was in my bag, but I couldn’t put the words in order.Before darkness swallowed me, I saw a man in a black coat charging through the automatic doors.Roman caught me before I hit the pavement.When I woke, electrodes covered my head and monitors cr

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

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

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