Dr. Ostrowski looked at her for a long time.
Then she took off her glasses, picked up a pen, and signed the referral.
“You have a very persistent friend,” she said.
“He’s not my friend,” Harper said. “He’s my Wyatt.”
Graham looked at the floor.
On July 8th, Harper and Diane drove to Philadelphia.
Graham stayed in Bramble Creek to keep working. He drove out every Friday night after work. Six hours each way.
Wyatt wrote Harper a letter every single day. By hand. Because I still had his phone.
He mailed them to the family housing building across the street from Lindwood Children’s.
He never once asked me why Mr. Quinn had come to our house that night.
I hadn’t told him yet.
I didn’t know how.
I gave Wyatt his phone back on July 29th. The morning we drove to Philadelphia.
Harper’s infusion was scheduled for the thirtieth. Day Zero, the nurses called it. They’d taken her own white blo.od cells out three weeks earlier, through a machine, the same way they take plasma. They’d shipped them to a lab in New Jersey. The lab had taught them what to hunt.
