I walked straight to the nurse’s station, tracked down her primary oncologist, and spent the next hour reconstructing the medical reality I had blindly ignored. The prognosis was difficult, but the doctors were hopeful; she just needed a matching bone marrow donor and a strict regimen of care.
When I walked back into her room later that evening, she had been moved from the hallway back to a proper bed. She looked at me with a mixture of fear and exhaustion as I set my coat down on the visitor’s chair.
“Arjun, go home,” she muttered, her eyes casting downward. “The papers are signed. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I’m not here because of a piece of paper, Maya,” I said, sitting on the edge of the mattress, looking at her short, cropped hair and the fierce spirit still hiding beneath her tired eyes. “I ran away when things got quiet because I was a coward. I thought leaving was the simpler path. But there is nothing simple about a life without you.”
