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

13

The Good News

Clam

genuinely remarkable patient. Your body is fighting this in a way that is outside the normal distribution.”

I told her she was a fighter,” my mother said, her voice still not quite steady, but filled with actual happiness than the fixed ones she wore on her face all the times I told her from the beginning.”

“You were right.” Frank closed the folder. “I want to see you in three days for pre-cycle woodwork, and then we start the fourth infusion the following Monday. Between now and then-rest, eat what you can manage, let your family take care of you. And allow yourself to feel this.” He looked at me with something that I recognized, after a moment, as genuine personal feeling-not just the warmth of a good doctor but the feeling of someone who’d been invested in an outcome and was watching it materialize. “This is good news, Sedona. You’re allowed to receive it.”

He left with the quiet efficiency he always had, and the door clicked shut behind him, and for a moment my mother and I just sat in the aftermath of what had been said.

Then Jennifer Preston put her arms around me-carefully, always Carefully, always mindful of the lines and the port and the general fragility of the body she was embracing-and held on, and I felt her shaking slightly, and I let her, because she’d been holding herself together for weeks and this was the first moment where the thing she’d been holding herself together for had actually arrived.

“Full remission,” she said, into my shoulder. “Full remission, Sedona.”

“Not yet,” I said. “One more cycle.”

“Full remission.” She said it again, like she was learning to say it, like practice would make it more real. “My girl is going to be all right.”

I held her back, both arms, and looked at the ceiling, and just cried tears of joy.

Allow yourself to feel this.

I tried. For a few minutes, in the quiet of the hospital room with my mother’s arms around me and the graph on the folder showing a line that went down and kept going down, I allowed myself to feel it.

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.

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