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It’s how I met her. Two decades ago, she was dancing all by herself in front of a record store in Astoria, lost in bliss and music. Her red dress flared wide as she pirouetted, tripped, and fell right into my arms. I wasn’t waiting for her, but I might as well have been. It was as if my whole life had grown up around an empty space, and it wasn’t until I met Elena that I realized she was the thing that space needed to be filled with.

It’s quiet right now, though. Elena doesn’t have the strength even to put a record on the turntable anymore. She sure as hell can’t dance.

The kitchen table between us is covered in papers. Medical reports, prognosis updates, test results, each worse than the last. It’s shit I never wanted to learn to decipher.

But fate has left me no choice.

I could recite them all from memory now. I know all the ways her body is failing her. Failing both of us, really.

Acute myeloid leukemia.

Refractory to treatment.

Terminal prognosis.

Elena sits across from me. Her dirty blonde hair hangs limp against her shoulders. It’s dull where it used to shine. Her brown eyes are sunken into cavernous hollows, but they’re still fierce, and still burning with that stubborn fire that made me fall in love with her twenty years ago.

She’s lost so much weight that her wedding ring wobbles around her finger when she reaches across the table to cover my hand.

“I’m done, Lukas,” she says.

I don’t look up from the papers. If I look at her, I’ll break. And I can’t break. Not now. She needs me to be strong.

“One more,” I growl. “There’s a new specialist in Switzerland running a study. It’s experimental, but promising. I’ve already made the calls?—”

“No.” Her hand tightens on mine. The bones feel fragile as bird wings beneath her papery skin. “No more treatments. No more specialists. It’s over.”

I close my eyes. It hurts too fucking badly to do anything else.

“The cancer isn’t going anywhere,” Elena says. “So I’d like to make a choice myself, while I still have some dignity left.”

“You’re asking me to…” I can’t finish the sentence. Can’t even form the shape of it in my mouth.

“I’m asking you to love me enough to let me go.”

I finally look up at her. I’ve built a life on defying the odds. No one thought a boy from Russia could do the things I’ve done, reach the heights I’ve reached.

Now, though, she’s wasting away in front of me, and there’s nothing,not one fucking thing, I can do to stop it.

I can’t allow that.

I shove back from the table hard enough that my chair crashes to the floor behind me. “No,” I snarl. “Fuck no. We’ll find something else. Another doctor. One of these has to fucking work.”

Elena just looks at me with that maddening calm. I know that face better than I know my own. It’s the same expression she wore when she told me she was pregnant with Kirill. When she accepted my proposal in that dingy little apartment in Brighton Beach. When she stood beside me at our wedding and promised me forever.

Forever was supposed to be a lot fucking longer than this.

“I’ve made my decision, Lu,” she says quietly. “I need you to respect it.”

“Fuck your decision.” I’m pacing now, hands fisted in my hair. “We’ll do the radiation again. The venetoclax trial, the allo transplant… All of it. Together.”

Nothing I say moves her.

But I don’t let that stop me.

Over the weeks that follow, I fly in specialists from across the globe—oncologists from Berlin, researchers from Singapore, a fucking witch doctor from Zurich who claims he can cure anything that ails with mistletoe extract and séances.

They all fail and I fire each one mercilessly.