The Billionaire's Heart (The Silver Cross Club Book 4) (9 page)

“If you insist,” I said. “But we’re going to need another bottle of wine.”

TEN

Sadie

It happened like this.

Ben rolled over in bed one morning and said, “I don’t feel right.”

One week, five blood tests, and two doctors later, he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.

I was at work during the appointment, but he called me after, his voice cracking slightly, and said, “The doctor told me to check into the hospital.”

I spun in my chair to face my cubicle wall, not wanting any of my co-workers to see my face. I asked, “When?”

“As soon as possible,” he said. “Like, today.”

That was the moment I knew it was serious.

Ben hadn’t felt well for weeks. Mysterious bruises bloomed underneath his skin and disappeared, and he started going to bed earlier and earlier, until he was asleep half an hour after dinner. I told him to go to the doctor and he wouldn’t, insisted he was fine, until the morning he finally admitted that he wasn’t.

He wasn’t fine.

We took the subway to the hospital, at his insistence. A cab would be wasteful, he said. There was no need, he said, and I gave in. I didn’t want to upset him.

The hospital was noisy, crowded, and aseptic, all white corridors and bustling nurses, but Ben’s room was quiet, just him and an older man who was rapidly dying of brain cancer. It was a small oasis, there on the ninth floor, with a view over the East River and Queens beyond it, and a small artificial plant on the windowsill. I wondered who had left it there. I didn’t think the hospital would waste money on something so frivolous.

“It’s nice,” Ben said, perched on his bed with an IV already dripping a clear fluid into his veins. “I guess.”

“For a hospital,” I said.

His oncologist came by that first evening to introduce himself. He was a tall, extraordinarily skinny man. Dr. Mukherjee. I hated a lot of people at that hospital, but Dr. Mukherjee wasn’t one of them.

“It’s most known in children, of course,” he said, in the calm, straightforward manner I came to appreciate so much over the course of the next several months. “Leukemia, I mean. But not uncommon in adults. We’ll need to do a biopsy to be certain, but I have little doubt that’s what we’re dealing with here. We’ll start you on the standard chemotherapeutic treatment.”

“What are my chances?” Ben asked, squeezing my hand tightly.

The doctor looked down at his clipboard. “Your blood counts aren’t great,” he said. “I won’t lie to you: it concerns me. Five-year survival rates for adults with this type of cancer are between thirty and forty percent.”

“That’s less than half,” Ben said, and I looked at him and saw that his face had gone white.

“Try to remain optimistic,” the doctor said. “There’s no better treatment you can give yourself. I won’t give up on you, as long as you promise that you won’t give up either.”

After he left, I leaned into Ben’s side, just for a moment, letting him bear up my weight, and then I said, “Do you want me to call my mom?”

“Yeah,” Ben said, “I’m—I want to know what she thinks.”

I nodded, and kissed him on the cheek.

My mother was a pediatric oncologist at Mt. Sinai. She’d seen plenty of leukemia before, and when I told her Ben’s blood count, she sighed and said, “That’s not great. It’s not
terrible
, but it’s not great. Let me come by and talk to his doctors.”

“They seem pretty competent,” I said, because I didn’t necessarily want her showing up and
meddling
, the way she was so good at doing; but on the other hand, this was probably the sort of situation that called for a little meddling.

“Don’t you sass me,” my mother said. “I’ll come by tomorrow. Tell that Ben to drink a lot of fluids and stay positive.”

I passed along the message, and Ben grinned and said, “Is your mom going to come boss me around? I can’t wait.”

“The fact that you enjoy her fussing is the sign of a sick mind,” I told him, and then bit my lip and looked down at the floor, because he
was
sick. I couldn’t joke about things like that anymore.

My life changed between one day and the next. I woke up that morning, the day Ben was admitted to the hospital, as a care-free twenty-something hipster, and the next day I felt thirty years older. I had more to worry about, now, than paying rent and getting a spot in my favorite spinning class.

I read everything I could find, whenever I had a quiet moment at work, looking for anything, any hint of a miracle cure, any experimental treatment that might help. I learned the names of all of Ben’s nurses, and did my best to get on their good sides. And I worried. I tried to hide it from him, but I felt it sitting in my belly, a dark lump, a cold stone, slowly dragging me down to earth.

I was afraid.

A few days after he was admitted, I showed up at the hospital after work and found a strange woman sitting beside Ben’s bed. She turned when I came in the room and gave me a look of distaste I recognized all too well:
Who’s this black girl?

“Mom,” Ben said to the woman, “this is Sadie, my fiancée.”

“Your
what
?” his mother said, the pitch of her voice rising sharply, and I knew then that Ben hadn’t told her anything about me.

He tried to explain, later, when we were alone. “They’re really racist,” he said, “my entire family, and I just didn’t want to deal with it. I didn’t want any trouble.”

“Okay,” I said, still numb. Three years. We had been together for three years, engaged for one, and he never even
mentioned
me. They lived in New Jersey, and he’d never bothered to introduce us. And I, stupidly, had never questioned it, had assumed they were estranged, or lived too far away, or—well, whatever it was that I had thought.

“I didn’t think you would care,” he said. “I guess I should have.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, even though it did, it
did
matter, like a knife through my heart—that he had loved me, promised to spend the rest of his life with me, and never spoke one word to the people who raised him.

He didn’t want the
trouble
?

If I’d found out six months earlier, we would have had a raging fight. He would have yelled, I would have thrown dishes, we would have slept in different rooms—and then we would have made up, and put it behind us. But I couldn’t throw a wine glass at his head, as sick as he was. There was no room for anger anymore. No outlet for it. Any capacity for rage had left me, drained away and replaced by sorrow. I needed it, that anger, to lance the wound and drain out the poison. It festered instead.

I would have forgiven him, if he asked for my forgiveness, but he didn’t ask.

His mother hated me. It was obvious from our first meeting, and it only got worse as the weeks went by. She refused to make eye contact with me, and responded in monosyllables to all of my attempts to make conversation. I quickly gave up on being friendly and tried to avoid her, but she never called ahead, just showed up at the hospital whenever she felt like it, and it was hard to make excuses to leave that didn’t sound like obvious excuses to leave.

It sucked, but I could have handled it. So what if she hated me? I wasn’t going to cry about it. But what really chapped my ass was that she got herself listed as next of kin, and excluded me from every important decision about Ben’s care. It wasn’t so bad early on, when he was still able to make decisions for himself, but toward the end, when he was totally out of it, she was calling all of the shots.

There was nothing I could do. We weren’t married. We had been waiting, saving up for a nice honeymoon in the Bahamas, and I came to regret that decision so hard I thought I would never be able to put it behind me. The medical decisions were the big thing, the major regret, but there was also little stuff, things I never would have thought about in my former life, the one I inhabited before Ben got sick. For instance: Ben had insurance, but it was a bare-bones, high-deductible plan, and mine had every bell and whistle. For instance: I used up all of my vacation days and sick leave, and after that I had to go back to work, struggling through every miserable eight-hour day before I could make the trek to the hospital, because I didn’t qualify for FMLA. If we had been married, if I hadn’t insisted on the fancy trip, if, if—

Hindsight, and all that.

By the time he got sick, it was too late.

I tried to get him to marry me, just get a marriage license and have it done quick and dirty, but he wouldn’t agree to it. “I don’t want you to be stuck with my bills,” he said. “Let my mom pay off my student loans. She deserves it.”

“You aren’t going to die,” I said.

“Just in case,” he said, and that was that.

We originally expected Ben to be in the hospital for a month, for his first round of chemotherapy, and then to be discharged and spend a month at home before the second round. That didn’t happen. Dr. Mukherjee came to speak with us toward the beginning of the fourth week and said, “I’m afraid that your cancer isn’t responding the way we hoped.”

“What does that mean?” Ben croaked out, and I scooted closer to him on the bed, wanting to offer whatever comfort I could.

“We’ll have to take a more aggressive approach,” the doctor said. “I won’t be discharging you at the end of the week. It’s best if you stay here so that we can monitor your progress on a daily basis.”

“Do I need a bone marrow transplant?” Ben asked.

The doctor shrugged. “It may come to that,” he said. “But not yet. A few other things we can try, first.”

He said a few more platitudes and then left us alone to cope with the bombshell he had just dropped.

I started crying. I didn’t mean to. Ben had enough on his plate, without worrying about me having an emotional breakdown, but I just couldn’t cope with it anymore. He was my best friend, my partner in crime, my safe harbor, and I didn’t know how I would go on with my life if he died and left me.

“Sadie, what’s wrong?” he asked, sliding one arm around my shoulders and hugging me close.

“I don’t want you to die,” I sobbed, tears streaming down my face, my words almost incoherent.

“I’m not going to die,” he said firmly. “We have plans. We’re getting married. We’re going to have kids and grow old together. I’m not going to leave you alone.”

“Promise me,” I told him. “Promise me that you won’t die.”

“I won’t die,” he said, and I believed him, for that one moment.

The moment passed.

Dr. Mukherjee’s backup plan seemed to work at first: Ben’s white count improved, and he seemed to have more energy, to be more like the man I fell in love with and less like the hollow-eyed wraith he’d become. But then he regressed, and regressed further, and the nurses started frowning at his chart in a way that told me there wasn’t much hope to be had.

I broke down and called Regan, finally. She knew that Ben was in the hospital, but I hadn’t told her how bad it was, had kept reassuring her that he was fine, getting better, home any day now, nothing to worry about. Regan was a grown woman, but in some ways she was still a child, with a child’s innocent view of the world, and I wanted to protect her as long as I could. But it wasn’t fair to keep lying to her. She cared about Ben. She deserved to be able to say goodbye.

“Sadie, I haven’t heard from you in ages!” she said, when she picked up. “Is Ben okay? Are
you
okay?”

I leaned against the wall and slowly sunk to the floor, sandwiched between an empty laundry cart and a stray chair. A passing nurse gave me a sympathetic look. They were all accustomed, here, to relatives in various stages of grief. I rubbed my free hand over my face and said, “Ben’s dying.”

It was the first time I had admitted it to myself, but it was true: he was dying, and everyone knew it, the doctors, the nurses, him, me.

Regan was quiet for long moments, processing, and then she said, “What do you need? How can I help you?”

I wasn’t sure what I had expected her to say, but it wasn’t that. I closed my eyes, overcome with gratitude, and swallowed past the hard lump in my throat. “Come visit,” I said. “He’d like to see you. We could both use some cheering up.”

“I will be
so
cheerful,” she said. “Oh, Sadie. I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this.”

“I don’t think it’s about deserving,” I said. “It’s just how the chips fell.”

I had to believe that: that it was random chance, that nothing I had done, or that Ben had done, had caused this. That we couldn’t have prevented it by drinking bottled water or eating more organic vegetables or whatever.

My parents were deeply religious, and I was too, as a kid, but somehow I fell out of the habit during college. God started seeming trite, or old-fashioned, or something. Uncool. I hung out with cynical, post-modern hipsters who liked to smoke weed and argue about nihilism. There wasn’t much room for belief there: only logic, and Nietzsche.

Anyway, I started praying again, after I talked to Regan that night. I didn’t think it would work, really, but it gave me some comfort.