Free The Billionaire's Heart (The Silver Cross Club Book 4) by Bec Linder Page A

leukemia.
    I was at work during the appointment, but he called me after, his voice cracking slightly, and said, “The doctor told me to check into the hospital.”
    I spun in my chair to face my cubicle wall, not wanting any of my co-workers to see my face. I asked, “When?”
    “As soon as possible,” he said. “Like, today.”
    That was the moment I knew it was serious.
    Ben hadn’t felt well for weeks. Mysterious bruises bloomed underneath his skin and disappeared, and he started going to bed earlier and earlier, until he was asleep half an hour after dinner. I told him to go to the doctor and he wouldn’t, insisted he was fine, until the morning he finally admitted that he wasn’t.
    He wasn’t fine.
    We took the subway to the hospital, at his insistence. A cab would be wasteful, he said. There was no need, he said, and I gave in. I didn’t want to upset him.
    The hospital was noisy, crowded, and aseptic, all white corridors and bustling nurses, but Ben’s room was quiet, just him and an older man who was rapidly dying of brain cancer. It was a small oasis, there on the ninth floor, with a view over the East River and Queens beyond it, and a small artificial plant on the windowsill. I wondered who had left it there. I didn’t think the hospital would waste money on something so frivolous.
    “It’s nice,” Ben said, perched on his bed with an IV already dripping a clear fluid into his veins. “I guess.”
    “For a hospital,” I said.
    His oncologist came by that first evening to introduce himself. He was a tall, extraordinarily skinny man. Dr. Mukherjee. I hated a lot of people at that hospital, but Dr. Mukherjee wasn’t one of them.
    “It’s most known in children, of course,” he said, in the calm, straightforward manner I came to appreciate so much over the course of the next several months. “Leukemia, I mean. But not uncommon in adults. We’ll need to do a biopsy to be certain, but I have little doubt that’s what we’re dealing with here. We’ll start you on the standard chemotherapeutic treatment.”
    “What are my chances?” Ben asked, squeezing my hand tightly.
    The doctor looked down at his clipboard. “Your blood counts aren’t great,” he said. “I won’t lie to you: it concerns me. Five-year survival rates for adults with this type of cancer are between thirty and forty percent.”
    “That’s less than half,” Ben said, and I looked at him and saw that his face had gone white.
    “Try to remain optimistic,” the doctor said. “There’s no better treatment you can give yourself. I won’t give up on you, as long as you promise that you won’t give up either.”
    After he left, I leaned into Ben’s side, just for a moment, letting him bear up my weight, and then I said, “Do you want me to call my mom?”
    “Yeah,” Ben said, “I’m—I want to know what she thinks.”
    I nodded, and kissed him on the cheek.
    My mother was a pediatric oncologist at Mt. Sinai. She’d seen plenty of leukemia before, and when I told her Ben’s blood count, she sighed and said, “That’s not great. It’s not terrible , but it’s not great. Let me come by and talk to his doctors.”
    “They seem pretty competent,” I said, because I didn’t necessarily want her showing up and meddling , the way she was so good at doing; but on the other hand, this was probably the sort of situation that called for a little meddling.
    “Don’t you sass me,” my mother said. “I’ll come by tomorrow. Tell that Ben to drink a lot of fluids and stay positive.”
    I passed along the message, and Ben grinned and said, “Is your mom going to come boss me around? I can’t wait.”
    “The fact that you enjoy her fussing is the sign of a sick mind,” I told him, and then bit my lip and looked down at the floor, because he was sick. I couldn’t joke about things like that anymore.
    My life changed between one day and the next. I woke up that morning, the day Ben was admitted to the hospital, as a