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He sat up slowly, feeling like he was coming out of a cave. He’d been lying in bed for so long that getting up and rejoining the world felt bizarre.
“There you go,” Tony said warmly. “I’ll go heat up your breakfast and meet you downstairs.”
He lingered for a moment on his way out of the room, and Adriano was sure he was wondering if it was safe to go or if Adriano would just lie back down. But he seemed to decide that it was worth giving his employer the benefit of the doubt.
It was the right move. Adriano had no intention of just lying back down. He had come to a decision.
Maybe he had to accept this diagnosis, but that didn’t mean he had to accept his fate.
He had money. Plenty of it. And medical breakthroughs happened all the time. Maybe there was no cure for Barks-Howard’s today, but if he followed his doctor’s instructions, he might have ten years. That was a lot of time for scientists to come up with something.
And he wasn’t going to settle for any old doctor in the meantime. He was going to find the best of the best. He was going to be treated by someone who wasn’t seeing the first case of Barks-Howard’s they’d ever encountered in their career. There must be a specialist out there somewhere, and Adriano was determined to find that person.
He wasn’t going to go down without a fight. That had never been his style.
And if that meant eating vegetables three times a day and giving up some of the finer things—well, that was all right. It would have to be all right. The important thing was that this disease was not going to get the better of Adriano Canali. Nothing in his life had ever bested him, and Barks-Howard’s disease wasn’t going to be the first.
He got dressed for the first time since his diagnosis, leaving the sweatpants he’d been wearing in a puddle on the bedroom floor. Already, he was ashamed of the way he had been acting. He’d made a fool out of himself, and he was better than that.
Now he was just going to have to prove it.
He went downstairs to face the day, knowing that he had a fight ahead of him. But Adriano wasn’t going to back down from a fight. By the time this was all over, Barks-Howard’s disease was going to regret ever having messed with him.
CHAPTER2
AMY
“You know you work too hard, right?” Mike said.
“I work as hard as I need to work,” Amy told him firmly, shrugging off her lab coat and tossing it over the back of one of the dining room chairs. “I’m really glad you made it out for a visit, Mike, but that doesn’t mean you can start critiquing the way I live my life.”
“I’m not critiquing,” he said. “But you’re my sister. I worry about you. You’re burning out.”
“I’m really not.” She was pretty sure it was the truth. She did work hard, but that was to be expected when you were a doctor—especially when you were a relatively young female doctor still trying to earn your stripes. Amy knew she was great at what she did, but that didn’t mean anybody else knew it yet. She had to prove herself, and she was determined to do that.
Unfortunately, sometimes that meant working long hours.
She went to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer. Snapping off the cap, she tossed it in the sink to deal with later.
“Nice,” Mike said. “Hand me one of those, will you?”
Amy pulled out a second beer and passed it to her brother.
“I don’t like seeing you at work all night every night,” he said.
“It’s nine o’clock, Mike. There’s plenty of night left.”
“No, there isn’t. Because you went in at seven o’clock this morning, and now you’re going to have to go right to sleep so that you can start early tomorrow. You’re not getting any downtime, and people need downtime.”
Amy drank her beer and said nothing. He had a point. If she’d been one of her own patients, she would have told herself to cut way back on her hours. But it didn’t work that way, not if she wanted to be successful. It couldn’t. She had to put in her time.
She had to make up for the time she hadn’t been able to spend at work when their mother was alive.
As if following her train of thought exactly, Mike said, “Is this about Mom?”
Amy closed her eyes. It wasn’t something she liked admitting, but she couldn’t lie to her brother. “I had to spend a lot of time with her when she was alive,” she said.
“You know how sorry I am that I couldn’t be around more to help you with that.”
