“Do you two like each other?” I asked him once, when he was twelve.
He looked at me like I’d suggested he eat a worm.
“Mom. Gross. She’s Harper.”
That was the end of that conversation.
Then, the fall before last, Harper got sick.
It started with bruises. Then exhaustion. Then a hospital stay that turned into three. The word nobody wanted to say turned into a word everybody said in whispers.
Leukemia.
I watched it hit my son like a truck.
He stopped eating dinner. He stopped playing video games with his friends. He spent every free minute texting her, or sitting on the floor of her hospital room at Bramble Creek Regional doing homework while she slept.
Then the chemotherapy took her hair.
All of it. In three weeks. Her long, thick, dark brown hair that she’d worn in the same braid every single day since she was seven.
