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He slides down from the table and I notice how pale his face is. Now I’m worried, too.
As soon as he’s out of the training room, Andrea pulls the door closed and approaches me.
“What is it?” I ask her.
“I’m not sure. His lungs sound bad to me, and his lymph nodes are enlarged.”
“His lymph nodes?” I just look at her, in shock.
I learned a few things about cancer when Danielle was sick. Jack’s enlarged lymph nodes could be a sign of something very, very bad.
“That’s what the lump on his head is,” Andrea says. “But listen, let’s not panic. I’ll meet you at the hospital and we’ll get some tests going on him. We’ll get to the bottom of this, okay?”
I nod numbly. But it’s not okay. Nothing is. I’ve lost Matt and Danielle, and Abby’s been through hellish losses of her own. I can’t bear the idea of Jack being sick like Danielle was. Just the idea of it makes my stomach turn so hard I’m close to vomiting.
“Luca,” Andrea says. “Meet me at the Memorial ER, okay? I’ll call ahead and let them know we’re coming.”
I nod, swallow hard, and pull myself together. If I didn’t have to stay strong in front of the kids, there’s no way I could even walk out of the locker room.
But I do. For them, I do.Chapter Twenty-SevenAbbyI’ve never been to Memorial Medical Center, but I have to take several deep breaths just to be able to walk inside the emergency room entrance.
“Where’s Jack?” Emerson asks, her eyes wide as she looks up at me.
“He’s probably in a room with a doctor. We’ll find him.”
Keep it together, Abby. Keep it together for the girls.
I’m shaking. It didn’t even occur to me how hard it would be to walk into a hospital until I was parking the car. I haven’t been inside a hospital since the day Chloe died inside one. And even though this is a different place, in many ways…it’s the same.
The smell nauseates me. Disinfectant seems to have a universal scent, and it brings me right back to those long days of waiting for news when Chloe was on life support.
We sit down in a row of waiting room chairs and I text Luca to let him know we’re here.
“I want to see my brother,” Cora says.
She’s been anxious about Jack since Luca came out and told us he needed to go to the hospital. He told me to take the kids home and that he’d call when he knew more, but Cora wouldn’t have it. She wanted to be here with Jack.
“Let’s see what Luca says, okay?” I pat her knee reassuringly. “We need to make sure it’s okay for us to go back there.”
Cora tucks her hair behind her ears and leans her elbows on her knees. I’m not sure being in the exam room with Jack would be good for her. It may just fuel her fears. But being out here, in the dark about what’s going on, isn’t so great, either.
Luca texts me back. Cora not-so-subtly reads the message out of the corner of her eye at the same time I read it.
Luca: He’s getting blood drawn. Lots of tests to be run.
Me: Cora wants to see him.
Luca: I’ll have Andrea come get you guys.
“We get to see him?” Cora asks me hopefully.
“Yes.”
“Who’s Andrea?”
“I think she’s the doctor for Luca’s team.”
A woman comes through the ER’s main entrance, wailing. There are police officers on either side of her.
“They’re tryin’ to kill me!” she screams, her eyes wide. “They tried to murder me!”
Emerson leans closer to me and I put my arm around her. The woman keeps yelling, accusing the people in the check-in area of being in on the conspiracy to kill her. I’m relieved when a woman walks out, seeming to recognize us.
“Luca showed me a picture so I could find you,” she says. “I’m Andrea.”
“Hi, nice to meet you,” I say as the girls and I get up.
“Is my brother okay?” Cora asks her.
“Yes, come on back and see him.”
“Can we go home?”
Andrea meets my gaze and then gives Cora a sympathetic smile.
“The doctors are taking care of him right now, trying to make him all better.”
“But what’s wrong with him?” Fear pools in Cora’s eyes.
“We don’t know yet.”
We follow Andrea down a long, busy corridor to a shorter one, and memories assault me. Every door we pass is like living my recurring nightmare that Chloe’s in the hospital and I can’t find her.
I don’t know if I’m relieved or not when Andrea knocks lightly on a door before opening it to step in.
“Hey,” Luca says, getting up from the plastic chair he’s sitting it.
Cora practically flies to the bedside. She takes Jack’s hand and he gives her a puzzled look.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want you to be sick.” Her voice breaks as she tries to fight back tears.
