Now they were coming back.
Wyatt didn’t sleep in the car. He sat in the passenger seat with his notebook on his knee and read me his definitions out loud for six hours.
“Cytokine release syndrome,” he said somewhere in Pennsylvania. “That’s when the new cells start attacking the can.cer so fast your whole body goes into overdrive. High fevers. Low blo.od pressure. It means it’s working. But it can get really bad.”
“How bad?”
He didn’t answer.
He just turned the page.
Lindwood Children’s Hospital was enormous. Glass and steel and a giant mobile of paper birds hanging in the lobby, turning slowly in the air conditioning.
Harper was on the eleventh floor. Room 1114.
She was sitting up in bed in her wig when we walked in. Pale. Thin. A hospital bracelet. The wig’s braid over her shoulder.
“You cut your hair,” she said to Wyatt, deadpan. “It looks terrible.”
