“You have your mad shoulders.”
Claire almost smiled. “I’m mad at paperwork.”
“That sounds boring.”
“It is extremely boring.”
Emma studied her. “Is the weird test still good news?”
“I hope so.”
“You said hope before.”
“I know.”
Emma reached for Arthur and tucked him beneath her chin. “You can say you don’t know.”
The words landed with embarrassing force.
Claire brushed hair from her daughter’s forehead. “I don’t know yet.”
“Okay.”
Emma closed her eyes again.
At 8:06, Daniel returned with two paper cups of coffee and a sealed tube request form.
“The comparison is running.”
Claire took the coffee but did not drink it.
“What else did you find?”
He hesitated just long enough that she knew there was something.
“The Rowan project had a site at Lakeshore Children’s Clinic.”
Claire knew that place.
Emma’s pediatrician had practiced there when Emma was a toddler.
“I took her there.”
“Yes.”
“Not to St. Catherine.”
“No.”
Claire closed her eyes.
Memories returned in fragments. A fish mural in a waiting room. A plastic bead maze. Emma crying because a nurse wanted to look in her ears. Claire leaving early for a shift one afternoon while her mother stayed with Emma for a routine appointment.
“My mother used to take her when I worked evenings.”
Daniel nodded. “That may be the connection.”
Claire’s mother, June, had died four years earlier after a stroke. She had been organized to the point of annoyance, the kind of person who saved appliance manuals and stapled receipts to warranty cards. If she had taken Emma to a screening, there might be a record somewhere.
Claire called her brother at 8:30 and asked whether the boxes from their mother’s house were still in his basement.
“All twelve million of them,” he said sleepily.
“Don’t throw anything away.”
“I have been begging you to let me throw things away for four years.”
“Not today.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know yet.”
There it was again.
The answer Emma had taught her to tolerate.
At 9:17, Dr. Shah entered the room with Daniel.
Claire stood before either of them spoke.
“The samples match,” Dr. Shah said.
Claire gripped the bedrail.
“Both samples are Emma’s.”
Daniel’s face was serious, but there was something underneath it now. Relief.
“And the protein marker?” Claire asked.
“Present in both,” he said. “Seven years apart.”
That changed the medical question.
The marker was not a temporary consequence of Emma’s current illness. It had been there before the six months of hospitalizations, before the medications, before anyone had named the condition they thought they were treating.
Daniel pulled a chair closer.
