Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 86

Chapter 80: The Good News

Sedona’s POV

I looked at the graph. The line dropped, then dropped faster, then dropped faster still.

“What does that mean?” My mother’s voice was careful, the voice of someone who knew how to ask things without infusing hope into them, because hope that got ahead of the data was its own kind of pain.

“It means her body isn’t just tolerating the treatment.” Frank looked at me directly. “It’s using it. More effectively than the trial average,. Each cycle is more effective than the last rather than hitting a ceiling.”

“Is that common?” I asked.

“In the trial population, it occurred in roughly fifteen percent of responders.” He paused again, and this time the pause was deliberate, carrying weight before he broke it continuing.

“Sedona, I need to be careful about how I say this, because medicine is not certain despite what people think and prognosis is not a promised because it changes every passing minute. But I want to tell you what I’m looking at, honestly, because you’ve always asked me for honesty and this something that is too big for me to not tell.”

“Yes,” I said. “Tell me.”

“At the current rate of response, if the next cycle holds this trajectory-” He set the folder down on his knee. “We may be looking at full remission.”

The room went very quiet.

Not the heavy quiet of bad news, which I’d gotten used to. This was a different kind that came when something that was too large just dropped in the immediate vicinity and nobody knew what to do next.

My mother made a sound that wasn’t a word. She pressed my hand between both of hers and made that sound and then stopped, pressing her lips together.

“Full remission,” I said, because I needed to hear myself say it, understand what he was saying.

“I want to be clear-we’re not there yet. One more cycle, possibly two, before I’ll use that word officially. And even after remission, we’re talking about monitoring, about follow-up protocols, about the statistical realities of recurrence that any oncologist will be honest with you about.” He looked at me steadily.

“But yes it is possible in a few months if all goes well. Full remission is what I’m working toward and what the data currently suggests is achievable.”

I looked at the graph again..

“You said it wasn’t the result you expected on this timeline,” I said to him “How far outside what you expected

“Six to eight weeks ahead of the most optimistic scenario I modeled.” Frank leaned back slightly. “I’ve been doing oncology for twenty-two years. I’ve seen responses that surprised me in the field.. You are a genuinely remarkable patient. Your body is fighting this in a way that is outside the normal distribution.”

It felt like breathing. Like the first real breath after a very long time underwater.

They came that afternoon-all of them, which hadn’t been planned as far as I knew but had somehow happened anyway.

My father arrived first, with the novel under his arm, and stopped in the doorway when he saw my mother’s face and understood immediately that something had changed. She didn’t have to say anything. He crossed the room and looked at me and I told him what Frank had said, and watched his face do the thing it had been doing more frequently since I’d come home, letting his emotions show.

He sat at the foot of my bed and put his hand over my feet through the blanket, the way he used to when I was small and sick with something ordinary, something that passed in a week and left no mark. The gesture was so familiar that it bypassed everything I’d carefully managed and hit something direct and deep, and I had to look at the ceiling for a moment.

Cameron came twenty minutes later, and I watched his face go through the same sequence as my father’s when I told him about what the doctor said.

He sat in the chair beside my bed, where he’d been for the past hour many hours beside ma and kept me company.

“Cam,” I said.

“Yeah.” His voice was rough. “I know. I heard you.”

“Say something.”