Chapter Text
The Drop was closed.
Not officially, but it was the slow part of a weekday afternoon, the lull between the lunch crowd and the early drinkers, and Deran had cleared the last two regulars out.
Craig was already there when Pope arrived. J came in five minutes later through the back, the pale eyes already cataloguing the room.
They all gathered after Craig texted All of us. Bar.
They were arranged at the corner table — the round one near the window, the one Deran kept reserved by leaving four chairs slightly out of place so the regulars knew not to touch it — when Smurf walked in.
She didn't pause at the door and walked through the bar like she owned it. She was in a black silk top, the good jeans, the small gold cross on her neck.
Deran stood up before she reached the table.
"You're not welcome here, by the way."
He said it flatly.
Smurf stopped a few feet from the table. She didn't react.
"I have a job."
The four of them went still.
Pope set his beer down.
Smurf pulled out the empty fifth chair without being invited and sat in it, and she folded her hands on the table in front of her with the composure of a woman who had rehearsed exactly the order of the conversation she was about to have.
"I have a job," she said again. "It's a good one. It's bigger than anything we've done in years. I need all of you. We'd be gone a few weeks. There's a window opening and we have to move while it's open."
"No," Deran said.
"Deran."
"No, Smurf. Listen to me. No." His voice didn't rise. "I can't do this anymore. I made that very clear to you.” His eyes flicked once toward his brothers.
Smurf's eyes moved to Pope.
He didn't look away.
"I'm not going," Pope said quietly.
"Andrew."
"I'm not going."
Smurf looked around the table.
Craig was leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed, his jaw set like when he was trying not to say something. J had his laptop closed on his lap, hands folded over it, the pale eyes watching her with no expression at all.
She breathed out, slowly.
"You're nothing without me."
She said it the way she said everything that mattered. Like she was reminding them of something inconvenient but true.
"You think you have lives," she said. "You think this —" a small gesture at the bar around them, "— is yours, Deran. You think the boats you take out and the surfing and your little routines are something you built yourselves. You're going to listen to me very carefully now. I built all of it. I built every floorboard of this bar. I made the phone calls that got Craig out of the warrants in 2015 and 2017. I paid for J's school. I paid for the lawyers and the bondsman and the off-duty cop who wrote the favorable report on Andrew that kept him out for two extra years."
The table didn't move.
"You are nothing without me. You have nothing without me. You wouldn't be sitting in this chair without me." Her eyes moved back to Deran. "You think you got this bar because you wanted it? You got this bar because I planned three jobs and put the money in your name and walked you through it like a child."
Deran's jaw worked.
"And now I'm asking you for two weeks," she said. "Two weeks of your time. To do one job. I built this entire family for almost forty years and I'm asking for two weeks."
"No," Deran said again.
"It's enough money to stop."
Silence.
"It's enough money," she said again, slower, "that none of you would ever have to do this again. Any of it. Ever. I'm talking real numbers. The kind that ends conversations. You walk away after this and you are clean and you are funded for the rest of your lives and your children's lives." Her eyes moved around the table. "It's the last one. It's the last thing I will ever ask any of you to do."
Pope set his beer down.
"You already said that."
He said it flatly.
Smurf's eyes shifted to him.
"What?"
"You said that last time. And the time before that. One more. The last one. You've been saying that for years, Smurf. It's never the last one. It's never going to be the last one. There's always one more after this."
Her face did something small.
"Andrew."
"It's not the last one."
"Andrew, shut up and accept my words." She said it sharp. "I'm not having this fight with you right now. I'm telling you what's happening. You're going to do this with me. After this you'll be free to go and fuck that little doctor for the rest of your life. That's the deal."
He was on his feet before he decided to be.
Chair back, two long strides, his hand around her throat — not crushing, not yet, just the warm solid shape of his hand closed around the front of her neck with his thumb at her pulse and his fingers at the back of her jaw, and he leaned down until his face was very close to hers and the rest of the bar disappeared.
He kept his voice low.
"If you ever," he said, "bring her into a conversation again, I will kill you."
She didn't move.
She didn't move because she couldn't, with his hand where it was, but she also didn't move because she understood, the way she always understood, exactly the shape of what she was looking at. Her eyes were steady on his.
"Andrew."
"I mean it." He didn't blink. "You don't say her name. You don't put her name in your mouth. You don't reference her. You don't think about her. You don't include her in your math. Whatever you're planning, whatever you're calculating, she is not in it. If you ever speak of her again in any conversation about this family or anything I owe this family, I will kill you with my own hands."
The bar was very quiet.
He could feel Deran on his left. He could feel Craig on his right. Neither of them moved. Neither of them spoke. He could feel J behind him, not moving either.
Smurf swallowed once under his hand.
He felt it.
"Andrew," she said. Calm. The calm of a woman who had been threatened many times in her life and had a system for it. "Take your hand off me, baby."
"Say it back to me."
"I won't bring her up."
"Say her name."
A small pause.
"Samira."
"Say it again."
"I won't bring Samira up."
He let go.
He stepped back.
He stood there for a second looking at her with his hand at his side and then he turned and walked back to his chair and sat in it and picked up his beer. His hand was completely steady. He took a sip.
Nobody at the table spoke.
Smurf put her hand to her throat and lowered it again. She straightened the collar of her silk top.
"Two weeks," she said. Her voice was a little rough now but otherwise the same. "I need an answer by Friday."
"No," Deran said.
"Deran."
"No."
She looked at Craig.
"No, Mom."
She stood up. She picked up her bag from the back of the chair where she'd hung it. She looked once around the table at all four of them and her face was perfectly composed.
"You'll change your minds," she said.
She walked out.
The door swung shut behind her.
The bar was very quiet.
Craig let out a long slow breath.
"Pope."
J was looking at Pope with the pale eyes, and Pope didn't look back, because he didn't entirely trust what J would see in his face if he did. He took another long sip of the beer.
"You okay?" Deran said.
"Fine."
"Pope."
"I'm fine."
A pause.
"You meant it," Craig said.
It wasn't a question.
Pope looked at his beer.
"Yeah."
Then J, quietly, from across the table:
"I won't go either."
It wasn't directed at anyone. It was just stated. He opened his laptop as he said it, the way he did most things, fitting an enormous decision into the same gesture as a small one.
Deran looked at his nephew for a long second.
"Okay, J," he said.
"Okay."
"None of us are going."
"No."
Craig finished his beer in one long swallow and set the empty glass down on the table.
"Fuck," he said, to nobody.
-
Later that night Smurf would talk to J, alone, in his bedroom, and offer him a different version of the job. She would tell him things about Pope and about Julia that she had never told anyone. She would offer him a number large enough to change his entire life. She would ask him not to tell his uncles.
J would say let me think about it.
-
The next morning Smurf would go to Deran's apartment before Adrian was awake. She would give him a number, and Deran would do the math and she knew he wanted to buy an apartment by the beach so him and Adrian could surf all the time.
She would tell him this was the last thing she would ever ask him for and she was asking him directly, without performance, without warmth.
Deran said he had to talk to Adrian first.
-
Craig would be easier to convince. She would catch him later, hungover, and make him coffee. She would ask him about the year long trip he always wanted to take to Mexico so he could surf and smoke weed and have sex around freely.
She would tell him she'd been listening. She would also tell him the number, smaller than Deran's, large enough.
Craig would say yes.
-
She would not ask Pope. She would let the others ask him.
-
The hospital had gone briefly quiet around three in the afternoon, in the small window between the lunch lull and the late-shift trauma surge, and Samira used it to sit down at the back desk with a stack of charts she had been meaning to update since Monday. The break room behind her was empty.
Samira's phone sat face-up on the desk beside her cup.
Dr. Moreno had called her that morning. Just wanted to flag, he had said, in the tired even voice he used when he was about to tell her something he had already exhausted his own options on. Janine Cody had not picked up the follow-up calls from the oncology office after walking out from her first chemo session fiasco. The infusion nurse had left two messages and had been told politely by a male voice on the third attempt that Mrs. Cody is not currently available, please stop calling this number. Gabriel had said it the way he said most difficult things, with the small clinical flatness he had developed in fellowship and never quite shaken off. I'm going to keep trying. I just wanted you to know. You met her first.
Samira had said she would call.
She had been thinking about how to call for the six hours since.
She understood the medical reality of the situation. Janine's tumor board had recommended an aggressive protocol that, even with full compliance, was likely to extend her life by months rather than years. The full protocol was the difference between a death that was relatively comfortable and one that was not. Walking out of an infusion was not, in Janine Cody's case, the difference between living and dying. She was going to die. The chemotherapy was the difference between how, and where, and how soon, and how much she would be conscious for at the end.
Samira had treated patients who refused treatment before. She had treated patients who refused treatment because they were tired, because they were religious, because they were scared, because they were depressed, because they had been let down by medicine for so long that they no longer believed in it. She had treated patients who refused treatment because they had decided that the dying they could control was preferable to the dying they could not.
She did not know that was what Janine Cody was doing. She suspected it. Suspicion was not a thing she got to act on as a physician. As a physician she got to call the patient, present the medical facts cleanly, answer questions, document the refusal if there was one, and offer to revisit. That was the procedure.
Samira picked up the phone.
It rang three times.
"Hello?"
"Janine, hi. This is Dr. Samira Mohan calling from Oceanside Memorial."
A pause.
"Dr. Mohan."
"Yes. Do you have a few minutes?"
"For our favorite neighbor? Always."
Samira ignored the second sentence and kept her tone exactly where it had been.
"I'm calling because Dr. Moreno's office reached out to me this morning. He let me know that you'd ended your last infusion session early and that the office has been unable to reach you to schedule the next one. I wanted to call you directly to check in, hear how you're doing, and answer any questions you might have about the treatment plan."
The pause on the other end of the line had a different shape than the first one.
"That's very kind of you, sweetheart."
"How are you feeling, physically? Have you had any new symptoms since we last spoke? Headaches, vision changes, any difficulty with speech or motor function?"
"I'm feeling fine."
"Any nausea? Fatigue beyond what you'd consider normal?"
"I'm feeling fine, Dr. Mohan."
"Okay." Samira pulled the chart open on the tablet in front of her. "I want to share some information with you, and then I want to hear what you're thinking. Is that all right?"
"Of course."
"Your last MRI showed the tumor responding modestly to the first cycle of the concurrent protocol. The mass effect on the surrounding parenchyma was reduced. The radiation oncology team noted some early signs of necrosis at the tumor margin, which is what we want to see. Continuing the protocol gives you the best chance of preserving cognitive and motor function for as long as possible and of managing pain and symptoms as the disease progresses. Stopping treatment now will accelerate the timeline considerably and will also reduce our ability to manage your symptoms in the later stages. I want to make sure you have that information clearly before you make a final decision about how you want to proceed."
There was a small silence on the line.
"You're very thorough."
"I want to make sure you have the information. Is any of what I just told you new to you?"
"No. Gabriel went through all of that."
"Okay. So this is a decision you're making with the medical picture in mind?"
"Yes."
"Can I ask you what's driving the decision?"
A longer pause this time.
"It's my body, doctor."
"It is."
"I get to decide what happens to it and when it happens."
"You absolutely do."
"You're not going to argue with me?"
"I'm not. I'm asking you what's driving the decision because the more I understand, the more useful I can be to you in whatever choice you make. If you're stopping because you've weighed it and the protocol isn't worth what it costs you, that's information. If you're stopping because there are aspects of the treatment we could modify to make it more tolerable, that's also information. If you're stopping because of something I haven't thought of, I'd like to know."
“Why are you calling me?”
"I'm calling you because I'm your physician, and Dr. Moreno's office let me know you'd stopped responding to outreach. Calling you is part of my job."
"Samira."
"Janine." Samira rubbed her fingers against her forehead. “I'm asking you to let me do my job. Is there anything about the treatment that we could change that would make you willing to continue?"
"You're a very direct young woman."
"I am."
"He must like that about you."
Samira looked at the back of the tablet for a second.
"Janine, I'd like to keep this conversation focused on your treatment. Is there a modification to the protocol you'd be willing to consider? A different infusion schedule? A different anti-emetic regimen? Anything we could change that would make the treatment something you could continue?"
"No."
"You're declining further treatment."
"I'm declining further treatment."
"I do want to say one more thing, and then I'll let you go."
"Go ahead."
Samira took a breath.
"You can change your mind. At any time. If at any point in the next weeks or months you want to revisit the treatment plan, even partially, even just for symptom management, the door is open. You can call me. You can call Dr. Moreno. You can come into the ER. We will not hold the prior decision against you. People change their minds about this, and we are set up to accommodate that. I want you to know that."
There was a very small silence.
"You're very good at this."
"I'm sorry?"
"You're very good at this. The voice. The phrasing. The —" Janine paused. "Standard."
Samira waited.
"I imagine the families love you. They feel taken care of. They feel heard. They feel like the worst day of their lives is being handled by somebody who actually sees them."
"That's the job, Janine."
"Yes." A beat. "It's a very specific kind of job. To be the person who is kind to people on the worst day of their lives. Some people are drawn to that work because they like the kindness, and some people are drawn to it because they like the position the kindness puts them in. I'm not sure yet which one you are."
Samira held the phone very still.
She kept her tone level.
"That's all right, Janine. You don't have to be sure. You just have to let me do my job."
"Lovely."
"Take care of yourself, Janine."
"You take care, doctor."
The line went dead.
Samira set the phone face-down on the desk and looked at the tablet in front of her and did not move for a long second.
-
It was almost ten when Pope came through her gate. He has been avoiding her again for five days now. Five days after paying for her groceries.
Samira heard him before she saw him, the weight of his boots on the front path, the way the gravel near the steps shifted differently under his stride than under anyone else's. She'd been doing nothing in the kitchen — washing a single plate, refilling her water glass, the small useless tasks of someone too tired to read but not too tired to sleep yet — and she looked up when she heard him and felt the day slide off her shoulders by one full degree before he'd even reached the door.
She opened it before he knocked.
"Hi."
"Hi."
He stood on her front step in the soft yellow porch light. He had a six-pack from the local lager he liked in his right hand, four bottles still in the cardboard and two missing.
"You been drinking."
"One. Maybe two."
"Andrew."
"It's a thirty seconds walk."
He almost smiled.
"Come in," she said.
He came in. He set the cardboard on the counter, opened one of the remaining bottles without asking, took a long swallow and offered a bottle to Samira. She accepted and watched him open it for her. She was in actual pajamas, a deep orange cotton shirt and blouse, her hair was wet from the shower she'd taken twenty minutes ago, and he was looking at her face the way he always looked at her face.
"Long day?" she asked.
"Same as always."
"That's not an answer."
He drank again. He set the bottle down.
"Long day."
"Yeah."
He didn't elaborate. She didn't push. They went out to the back porch because the kitchen was lit and the porch wasn't, and the night was warm enough for bare feet against the wood, and she sat on the top step and he sat one step below her so his shoulder was at the height of her hand. She put her hand on his shoulder. They drank their beers.
The yard was quiet. The pool light was on, low, throwing the soft blue across the patio.
"You're quiet tonight," she said.
"I'm always quiet."
"You're quieter. It's a calibration."
He breathed out through his nose.
"Tired," he said.
"Okay."
She didn't push.
She watched him. She didn't make a thing of watching him. She just let her eyes stay on his profile in the low light. He was looking at the pool. Or past it, more accurately. His eyes were focused on a middle distance that wasn't in the yard.
She thought: he's carrying something.
"Samira."
"Yeah."
"That neighbor at the corner. The one with the loud dogs."
"Mrs. Acosta."
"Yeah."
"What about her?"
"She left her gate open last week. Twice. I closed it the second time. The latch was sticking."
She felt herself smile.
"You're fixing the neighborhood."
"I'm not fixing the neighborhood. I'm noticing things."
He drank his beer.
"How was the ER today?"
"Same as always. We had a code at four. He didn't make it. Sixty-eight-year-old, family wasn't there when it happened, the wife got there twenty minutes after." She paused. "I had to tell her in the bad room."
"The bad room."
"The little family consult room. The one with the fake plant. We call it the bad room because nothing good ever happens in it."
"That's grim."
"Hospital humor."
"It's grim."
She laughed softly.
"You ate?" he asked.
"I had something around six before my shift ended."
"What?"
"A granola bar."
"Samira."
"I know."
"That's not food."
"I know."
They both kept drinking in silence.
"You're being —" she searched for the word, "— careful with me tonight."
"Mm."
"Why?"
He looked back at her.
She watched him decide whether to answer.
"Just tired," he said.
She held his eyes.
"Okay," she said.
He stood up suddenly.
"You're going home?"
"Yeah."
"Andrew."
"Yeah."
She walked back to the front door with him
"Thank you. That was a weird interaction, but I'm grateful you came over.” Samira crossed her arms against her chest. “I think you needed my presence tonight and I'm not sure why. But if something ever goes wrong."
"Mm."
"Call me. First. Before anyone. Day or night. I don't care. Call me."
He looked at her.
She watched something move across his face that she'd seen before but couldn't name — the small recalibration of a man receiving permission to do a thing he had already, without telling anyone, been considering.
"Okay," he said.
"Promise me."
"I promise."
"Same," she said. "Goes both ways."
The corner of his mouth moved.
"Yeah."
She watched until he was outside. She locked her door. She set the alarm. She went upstairs.
He would call her at 3:14 a.m.
-
Samira woke to the phone.
She kept it on silent overnight unless she was on call, but the vibration against the wood of the nightstand cut through whatever she'd been dreaming about and she was sitting up before the second ring.
She knew before she looked who it was.
She knew because she had told him call me first less than five hours ago and the universe did not waste setups like that. She knew because something in her body had been waiting for this call for weeks without her permission and now her body was ahead of her brain in the dark.
She looked at the screen.
Andrew.
She answered before the third ring.
"Andrew."
"I'm in your garage." His voice was wrong. Flat in a way that wasn't his flat, peeled flat, the flatness of a man holding himself together with what he had available and not much of it. "Can you come down?”
"I'm coming."
"Samira."
"I'm coming, I'm on my way."
She was already moving. She hung up. She grabbed the hoodie from the chair near the door without breaking stride and pulled it on as she went and she was on the stairs in fifteen seconds, taking them two at a time, barefoot, her hand finding the rail because her body already knew it would need the rail.
The kitchen was dark. The monitor on the wall was active — she saw it flash as she passed, the garage feed glowing pale, his shape inside it — and she did not stop to look at the screen because she was going to be with him in ten more seconds.
She unlocked the door to the garage with hands that were already steadier than they had any right to be. The training was kicking in before she'd consciously asked it to. Breathe. Slow your heart rate. Whatever is on the other side of this door, you will be more useful to it if you are calm.
She opened the door.
Andrew was pacing. He did not move like this. He moved with control, and the man in front of her was moving like his body was running on instinct and his brain hadn't caught up.
He was barefoot. Gray sweatpants. An old black t-shirt that looked like he'd grabbed it from the floor on his way out the door. His curls were damp at the temples — not from a shower, she registered, from sweat — and his breathing was rough enough that she could hear it from the doorway.
He saw her.
Then he crossed the garage in three strides and his hands were on her shoulders.
"Samira."
"I'm here. I'm here, what happened —"
"It's Smurf."
His voice cracked on her name.
Samira's training arrived all at once.
She did not let her face do anything. She did not let her body do anything. She put one hand over his where it was gripping her shoulder, gentle, just contact, and she kept her voice in the register she used for the worst families in the bad room.
"Tell me what happened."
"I heard her fall. I was awake — I was in the kitchen — I heard —" His breathing was wrong. "She was on the bathroom floor. I couldn't wake her up. I —"
"Is she breathing?”
"Yes —"
"Pulse."
"I — yeah, yeah, I checked, it was there, it was fast —"
"Did she hit her head."
"I don't know. I don't know, Samira, she was already on the floor when I —"
"Okay."
Samira squeezed his hand once on her shoulder.
"Okay. Listen to me. She's breathing and she has a pulse. That's the two things I needed. Okay?”
He looked at her.
"I'm coming with you. We're going to walk to her right now. I need you to breathe slower for me on the way. Just slower. That's all I need from you. Can you do that?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Good. Let's go. Take me to her."
The Cody property looked completely different at two in the morning.
The massive house loomed beside hers beneath moonlight and shadows, expensive and silent and deeply unsettling in the middle of the night. Pope moved through it fast once they stepped inside, barely turning lights on while leading her instinctively through hallways like his body knew every inch of the place even in panic. Samire got confused with the rooms arrangement and the general layout. Some rooms had to entries. Some could only be assessed by the outside.
Family photographs lined the walls in blurred flashes while Samira followed him deeper through the house, the smell expensive candles lingering faintly around them.
She followed him through it with his hand still in hers.
She was carrying it.
That was the thought that arrived as they moved through the dark house, and once it arrived she couldn't put it down. She already knew. She had known for weeks.
She had known.
He hadn't.
And now she was walking through his mother's house in the middle of the night holding his hand, and his hand was tight on hers because he was afraid, and his fear was the fear of a man who had not yet been told the thing that the woman beside him had already known.
She kept her face exactly as it had been.
Then Pope shoved open a bedroom door near the back of the house.
Janine Cody lay half sideways across her kingsize bed.
She looked pale against the dark sheets, thinner now than during the hospital visit weeks ago. Frailer.
Pope hovered near the doorway visibly unraveling beside her.
Samira moved beside the bed immediately. Pope stepped back instantly.
Samira crouched beside Janine while her brain moved rapidly through assessment patterns. Weak pulse. Shallow respirations. Severe weight loss more obvious now up close. Temporal wasting pronounced beneath the soft bedroom lighting. Skin pale with that fragile almost translucent quality advanced oncology patients developed near the end.
And underneath all of it: metastatic progression. Far advanced.
Samira checked her pupils carefully while Pope paced once near the wall before forcing himself still again like he physically understood she needed calm around her.
“I can't do much here. She needs to go to the hospital,” Samira kept her eyes on him. The sentence barely left her mouth before Janine stirred weakly against the pillows.
Her eyes opened slowly. Focused first on Pope. He stood near the bed breathing unevenly while panic sat openly across his face with absolutely nowhere to hide now. He looked younger. He looked, Samira thought, like a child.
Janine watched him silently for a second. Then her eyes shifted toward Samira.
And Samira saw it happen in real time.
The arithmetic.
It took less than two seconds.
Slowly, with visible effort that Samira no longer fully trusted, Janine tried pushing herself upright against the mattress.
Immediately both Samira and Pope moved toward her at the same time. Pope slid one arm carefully behind his mother's shoulders while Samira adjusted the pillows higher against the headboard. Janine winced softly beneath the movement. Up close, Samira could feel how frighteningly light she had become beneath the silk nightgown.
But the eyes were sharp.
The eyes were not the eyes of a frail woman.
The eyes were the eyes of a woman who had just realized, in the middle of her own medical emergency, that the universe had handed her a tool she had not expected to be given.
Janine settled back against the pillows. Her gaze moved between the two of them standing beside the bed with a slowness that was almost theatrical now, the slowness of a woman performing for one of the two people in the room. Samira had the horrible feeling, the one that had been crawling up her ribs: she's enjoying this.
Janine looked at Samira.
"You tell him."
Samira's stomach went cold.
"What?"
"You're the doctor." Janine's voice was weak but the pitch of it was wrong now. There was an undertone Samira recognized from the hospital, the patient register Smurf had stopped using the second she'd gotten Samira alone in room twelve, slipping back on now like a coat. "You tell him."
The room got smaller.
Samira understood exactly what was happening.
Smurf had clocked, in the three seconds between opening her eyes and saying you tell him, that Samira had known. Samira had not been told. Samira had not been called. Samira had been brought here by Pope, holding his hand, walking into Smurf's bedroom in sleep clothes at two in the morning. Which meant Samira and Pope were now the kind of close they had only been adjacent to last time Smurf checked.
Which meant Pope was about to be very, very hurt by the woman that held his hand.
Smurf had decided, in approximately one and a half seconds, that she was going to let that happen.
Because if Samira delivered the news, two things became true at once. The first was that Smurf got to be the recipient of the grief rather than the source of it, the woman in the bed being told I'm sorry rather than the woman saying it. The second was that the small fracture between Pope and Samira — the you knew and didn't tell me — would belong to Samira and not to her.
And if Samira refused, Smurf could deliver it herself, weakly, from the bed, in the version of herself that looked frail, and Pope would have to watch his mother tell him she was dying while the doctor he had brought home stood silently in the corner having already known.
Either way Smurf won.
Samira looked automatically toward Pope.
He was staring between them now, confusion slowly sharpening into fear. He had heard the strangeness of you tell him. He had heard it but he had not yet placed what it meant. He was a few seconds behind, the way grief makes people a few seconds behind, and Samira was watching him catch up in real time.
She stood slowly from beside the bed.
"Andrew," she said carefully. "Can we talk somewhere else for a second?”
Pope looked between her and Smurf once.
Then he nodded stiffly.
He led her silently through the hallway afterward while the giant Cody house remained dark and impossibly quiet around them. Samira followed him through the other side of the house, heart beating harder with every step because suddenly she understood this was about to become one of the moments that could shape everything between them.
Pope pushed open a bedroom door near the end of the hall.
The room devastated her instantly. There was almost nothing inside it.
A single bed.
Dark sheets pulled perfectly straight.
One lamp.
A wardrobe.
A small bedside table.
She blinked and looked around again. No photographs. No books. No clutter. No hobbies. Nothing personal.
The room looked temporary. Functional. He lived there without believing he deserved comfort or permanence.
Pope hovered near the doorway while she stepped farther inside. A small attached bathroom sat beyond one wall, equally sparse.
Samira sat carefully on the edge of the bed while Pope remained standing another second before finally lowering himself beside her. Close, but not touching.
"Andrew," she said softly.
He looked at her immediately. And God. The look in his face nearly destroyed her.
"Your mom has cancer."
Absolute silence. Samira watched the words land in real time.
Confusion first. Then understanding. Then denial trying desperately to push upward beneath it.
Pope stared at her without blinking.
"It's spreading," Samira continued quietly, because somebody had to say it. "She came to the hospital a few weeks ago. She had a severe headache and almost passed out. We ran imaging. The oncologist confirmed it the same day."
"Weeks."
His voice was almost nothing.
"Yes."
"You knew?"
"Yes."
She didn't soften it. She didn't dress it up. She let the word sit in the air between them and she watched him absorb it. Whatever he did with it, he was going to do later. Right now he needed the fact.
Pope bent forward hard enough that his elbows hit his knees while one hand covered his mouth. A broken sound escaped him then — low and raw and completely involuntary.
Samira felt tears sting instantly behind her own eyes.
He stayed folded over beside her for several long seconds, breathing unevenly, before finally turning blindly toward her without even seeming fully aware he was doing it.
And then — slowly — he laid his head in her lap.
Samira froze for half a heartbeat before instinct finally overrode shock. She touched his curls for the first time. Carefully. His hair was unbelievably soft beneath her fingers. She had wondered, at small useless moments over the past months, what his hair would feel like. It felt like this. It felt like a thing she should have been allowed to touch a long time ago.
Pope shook once beneath her hand while she stroked slowly through the curls at the back of his head, trying unsuccessfully to hold herself together while this enormous, dangerous, generous man silently broke apart against her knees.
Samira looked down at him while emotion climbed painfully into her throat, because suddenly all she could think was: nobody monitors him.
Nobody checked whether he ate. Slept. Took care of his injuries. Nobody seemed to notice when he was unraveling.
The conversation with Deran came crashing back at full force.
I had Pope. Pope didn't have anybody.
And then, layered on top of it, the dinner.
The night Smurf had cooked everything. Ribs, chicken, pasta, three desserts, the table set near the pool on a Friday evening. Samira sitting there carrying the cancer she had not yet been allowed to name. The food enough for twenty people. The specific abundance of a woman who had been told she was dying and had decided to spend a day in her kitchen demonstrating that she could still hold them inside a meal if she made it correctly.
And Pope.
Pope, who hadn't eaten.
Pope, whose plate had held rice and one untouched rib for two hours. Pope, who had filled his water glass and set it down and not drunk from it. Pope, who had sat beside her with his shoulder three inches from hers for the entire meal and answered every question his mother asked him in two words without looking at her face. Pope, who had only come because not coming would have communicated something he wasn't ready to communicate.
She had watched Smurf cross the room and put one hand against his jaw and kiss him on the mouth. Samira had filed all of it that night.
She filed it differently now.
Samira looked down at Pope and saw a man in his late thirties who let his mother kiss him on the lips at the dinner table because that was the language she had taught him to receive love in. A man who had sat beside her, the doctor next door, the only person in that compound he had chosen to sit beside, while Smurf orbited the table and rearranged her sons by gesture and warmth and serving spoon.
Samira saw Janine now. Really saw her.
Because Samira was a smart woman. Smart enough to recognize patterns when she saw them. Smart enough to understand that whatever the Cody family had become, whatever strange and dangerous life they all lived inside those walls, had been shaped around Janine Cody completely.
Samira looked around Pope's room again — the emptiness of it, the complete absence of individuality, the way it looked less like a thirty-something man's bedroom and more like a temporary place somebody slept between obligations.
This man who had never been allowed to make a home for himself because the home he was supposed to live in was the one his mother had built around him.
Samira looked down at the curls in her lap.
She kept stroking them.
After a while Pope sat upright abruptly. His eyes looked red now, face wrecked and tight while he stared at the floor for one second before finally looking toward her.
Samira thought maybe he would say something.
Instead, he stood.
Walked out. Then keys. Then the front door slamming. The truck engine roared to life seconds later.
He left her there.
Samira sat motionless on the edge of his bed for another long second afterward while the silence settled around her.
Then finally she stood slowly and walked back.
Janine remained awake when Samira reentered the bedroom.
Paler now beneath the lamp light. The silk nightgown rumpled in her shoulders. The bedside light cast her face in soft yellow, showing the hollow of her cheeks, the specific thinness of her neck against the pillow, the architecture of a face that was running out of time.
She looked at Samira with eyes that were not running out of anything.
Samira stopped near the doorway. She kept her arms at her sides. She kept her chin up. She did not soften her face the way she softened it for her patients.
This was not her patient anymore.
"That was unfair," she said.
Smurf's mouth curved faintly. "Aren't you a competent doctor?"
"You know what I meant."
The smile widened. The smile of a woman who had identified the angle of the fight and was looking forward to it.
"Come closer, honey."
"No."
Smurf's eyes flickered. Just briefly. The faintest recalibration.
"No?"
"No." Samira held her ground. "I can hear you from here."
"Mm." Janine pushed herself more upright against the pillows with visible effort, and Samira watched it automatically in clinical terms now — cachexia, weakness, metastatic progression, maybe four months if she was lucky and not many.
"You're angry with me," Smurf said.
"Yes."
"Good."
Samira didn't react.
"Most people pretend they aren't," Smurf continued, settling against the pillows with the small satisfied breath of a woman whose chess board had arranged itself the way she'd predicted. "It saves them from having to say anything true. You're not doing that. I appreciate it."
"I don't care what you appreciate."
"No," Smurf said pleasantly. "I don't suppose you would."
Samira watched her.
"You had no right to make me do that," she said.
"I didn't make you do anything."
"You made it the only available choice."
"That's not the same as making you do it." Smurf tilted her head against the pillow. "You chose. You made a choice. Don't tell yourself a story where you didn't."
"I chose because the alternative was watching you do it from that bed in a way that would have been worse for him."
"Yes."
"So you architected the choice. Don't pretend you didn't."
Smurf smiled. She actually smiled. The full version of it. The one she used when she'd been seen and decided to acknowledge it.
"You're sharp, doctor."
"I know."
"Mm." A pause. Smurf's eyes did not leave her face. "How does he take care of you?"
Samira didn't answer.
Smurf's voice stayed gentle. "Andrew. How does he take care of you? I'm asking because I know my son. I want to know if I taught him correctly."
"You don't get to ask me that."
"Why not?"
"Because you don't get to use his care for me as another piece of information. You know how he takes care of me. You designed it." Samira's voice stayed steady. "But I'm not your data."
Smurf was quiet for a long second.
Something moved behind her eyes that Samira couldn't name. It might have been pleasure. It might have been something else. Smurf was sufficiently practiced that Samira could not always tell which version of her was operating.
"You like each other," Smurf said.
It wasn't a question, so Samira did not answer.
"I've known since the dinner."
The dinner. The specific evening. The one Samira had been recontextualizing in Pope's bedroom while he cried in her lap.
Smurf continued. "He sat next to you. He sat there for two hours because you were there. He came because you would be there." Her mouth curved. "He doesn't do that. He hasn't done that for anyone since he was — well. So I knew. I knew that night."
"You used the dinner to confirm it."
"I used the dinner for a number of things."
"Including that."
"Including that. Yes."
Samira looked at her.
Samira thought, with a clarity that surprised her: you are the worst person I have ever met. You are the worst person I will ever come across.
"You care about him already." Smurf was watching her face. "Don't bother denying it. I can see it. Poor thing."
"Poor thing?"
"Mm."
"Which one of us is poor thing in this sentence?"
"Both of you, honey." Smurf's voice was gentle now. The mother voice. The one she used when she wanted the warmth to land. "You're both very poor things. You don't know yet what you've decided to love. He doesn't know yet what he is. You'll figure it out together, I hope. I'll be sorry I don't get to see it."
"Will you?"
"Will I what?"
"Will you be sorry?"
Smurf looked at her."That's an unkind question."
"You set the temperature, Janine."
Samira took one step forward. Only one. She did not come close enough to the bed to be reached. She stopped just inside the lamp light.
"I'm going to say something to you. Once. Now. While you're still able to hear me and we're both still in the same room awake and breathing." Her voice was steady. "Whatever you've taught him, I'm going to help him out of it. He will undo it. Slowly. Every day. Whatever time he has left of his life after you're gone, I am going to spend most by his side undoing what you did to him."
Smurf didn't move.
"Do you understand me?" Samira said.
"Yes."
"I want you to know that. While you can still hear it."
"I hear it."
"Good."
A long pause.
Smurf looked at her in the lamp light with an expression Samira could not entirely categorize. Something underneath the calculation that might, briefly, have been respect. Or grief. Or the closest thing to either of those that Smurf was capable of producing. Samira would think about it later and not be able to decide.
"Honey," Smurf said. Quietly. "I'm glad it's you."
She had braced for cruelty. She had braced for one more cut. Instead Smurf had handed her something that sounded, for one fraction of a second, like the mother she might have been if a different life had built her.
Samira didn't let the sentence work on her.
"You don't get to do that."
"What?"
"That. The soft thing. The I'm glad it's you. You don't get to be the woman who says that and the woman who handed me the cancer to deliver to your son in the same conversation. Pick one."
"I'm both."
"I know you are." Samira looked at her.
Smurf's mouth moved. Almost a smile.
Samira turned and walked out of the bedroom and did not look back.