By Monday, March sixteenth, my mouth was full of glass.
That was the only way to describe it. The new chemo had gone looking for every fast-growing cell in my body and found the inside of my mouth. My gums, my tongue, the insides of my cheeks, the back of my throat. Everything hurt. Even breathing through my mouth made my eyes water. Water tasted like pennies, and swallowing it felt like trying to get down a handful of gravel.
I couldn’t eat. I could barely talk. Everyone kept telling me to save my voice, as if I’d been planning to audition for a musical.
After the team reviewed the scans and agreed on the next regimen, we’d driven from Sierra Vista to Aurora on Thursday, March fifth, for five inpatient treatment days. I’d stayed at Aurora Children’s through Monday the ninth, gone home when the team cleared me, and spent the next several days discovering that leaving the hospital didn’t mean the hospital was finished with you. The soreness started as an annoyance, then spread until even small sips became a negotiation. By Sunday evening, March fifteenth, I couldn’t manage enough fluids. Dad called the oncology team, and we made the familiar drive back.
Now I was in room 618, a few doors down from where Lylah used to be. I’d tried not to look when they brought me up the night before. I’d even counted the ceiling lights as we passed her old room, because that was what my life had become. Chemo, hospital beds, and pretending I was deeply interested in fluorescent lighting.
Then someone laughed. It came from behind Lylah’s door, high and quick, followed by an adult saying something I couldn’t make out. A purple paper butterfly hung at eye level, its wings covered in glitter. Someone had written Keep Flying across the middle in crooked letters. It hadn’t been there the last time I’d come down this hall.
I turned before I could stop myself. Through the narrow opening was a bright quilt folded over the foot of the bed and a pair of fuzzy socks sticking out from beneath it. That was all. The door swung shut, and the butterfly fluttered against the wood.
Lylah would’ve had opinions about the glitter. Strong ones. She would’ve told me it was going to end up in the sheets, the food, and probably somebody’s lungs, then spent the next twenty minutes inventing increasingly ridiculous hospital policies against craft supplies. For half a second, I almost smiled. Then the empty place she’d left in my chest made itself known again.
Of course someone else was in that room. Hospitals didn’t retire beds because the person who’d slept in them was gone. I knew that. I just hadn’t expected to hear laughter there so soon, or to feel as though looking at a paper butterfly meant I was leaving Lylah behind.
Dad noticed where I was looking. He didn’t tell me it was okay or promise that time would make it easier. He just rested his hand over mine as the nurse wheeled me the rest of the way to 618.
I kept thinking about that butterfly long after we’d settled in. Someone new was there. Lylah was still gone. Both things were true, and I didn’t know what to do with either of them.
Angelina came in at nine with a cup of ice water and a bendy straw. She had long braids gathered in a scrunchie and a voice so gentle it almost made me angry. “We’re going to try one little sip, all right? If it hurts too much, you stop.” She waited until I nodded before holding the straw near my mouth.
I managed half a swallow. Pain flashed through my throat, and I jerked away, spilling water down the front of my gown. Angelina caught most of it with a washcloth. She didn’t tell me I was brave or ask me to try harder. She just set the cup aside and said she’d speak to the team about better pain control and a rinse.
Dad sat by the window, his legal pad unopened on his knee. Pops stood near the foot of the bed, arms folded so tightly that his knuckles pressed into his sleeves. Neither of them tried to make me drink again.
By noon, I needed the bathroom and hated everyone involved in that fact, including myself. The call button lay beside my hip. I looked at it for a full minute. Since October, I’d needed help with almost everything: getting in and out of cars, showering, reaching a shelf, crossing a room without putting weight on my left leg. Now I couldn’t even make it to the bathroom without somebody arranging equipment and asking whether I was dizzy.
I pushed back the blanket and tried to maneuver myself toward the edge of the bed. My right foot found the floor, but the moment I shifted, my left thigh seized with a deep, sickening ache. My arms shook. I caught the mattress with both hands and froze.
Dad was beside me before I could decide whether to be embarrassed or scared. “Don’t move, Fiorellina. I’ve got you.” He kept me steady while Pops pressed the call button. Angelina arrived with another nurse, and together they helped me back against the pillows before arranging a safe transfer to the bedside commode. Nobody scolded me. Somehow that made it worse.
Afterward, Dad pulled the blanket over my legs, careful not to jostle the left one. I looked at the ceiling until the tears stopped threatening to spill. I’d wanted to do one thing without help. Just one.
My blood counts weren’t cooperating either. Angelina explained that my hemoglobin and platelets had dropped after treatment, and the team wanted to give me transfusions. Two staff members checked the labels against my wristband before the blood was started. I watched them read everything aloud, because when people say your name enough times in a hospital, it starts to sound like it belongs to somebody else.
The warmed blanket Angelina tucked around me was almost worth the whole miserable afternoon. I lay beneath it while the pump clicked and Dad studied its display with the intensity he usually reserved for court documents. Pops finally sat down with a paperback he’d brought from home.
I hated needing somebody else’s blood. I hated knowing a stranger had taken time out of their day to give it. Mostly, I hated that I was grateful enough to cry about it.
The platelets came later, pale yellow in their bag. Halfway through, Dad’s phone buzzed on the tray table. He checked the screen and looked at me. “It’s Miss Davison. She knows talking hurts. Want me to put her on speaker?”
I almost shook my head. Then I held out my hand.
Dad answered and placed the phone near my pillow. Through the speaker came the faint whir of kennel fans and Miss Davison’s familiar voice. She asked how I was doing, caught herself, and told me I didn’t have to answer. “I wish I were calling with better news, sweetheart. It’s Dashiell.”
My chest tightened. She told us he’d been struggling. Kendra and Rhett could get him through the basic routines, and Chandler was still coming on Saturdays, but Dash had started refusing exercises he’d managed a month earlier. He’d eat if somebody sat beside him long enough. He spent too much time by the kennel-room window, watching people come and go.
“It’s not that he’s forgotten everything,” she said. “He’s stressed, and we’ve had too many changes in his routine. We’re working on it. I just don’t know whether he’ll be ready for Saturday.”
Saturday. March twenty-first. The evaluation we’d circled on the calendar months ago. Dad glanced at me. He knew exactly what that date meant.
“Please don’t think I’m asking you to come in,” Miss Davison added quickly. “I know you’re in the hospital, and your health comes first. We can ask the rescue to postpone and give him more time with a steady routine. Even if you were well enough to come, I wouldn’t put him through an evaluation he isn’t ready for. I wanted you to hear it from me instead of finding out afterward.”
I pictured Dash at the window, his scruffy head tilted whenever a car pulled into the lot. I remembered how he’d looked at me the first time he chose to cross the training room without bolting, like he was taking a chance and expecting me to notice.
I couldn’t even swallow water. There was no version of Saturday where I walked into Happy Paws and fixed everything with one magical visit. Still, I wanted to be there so badly my throat hurt for an entirely different reason.
Dad thanked Miss Davison and ended the call. The pale-yellow bag hung beside me, and I thought about the notebook on my desk at home, full of Chandler’s Saturday entries. I’d shut everyone out because I thought it would spare them. Dash didn’t understand any of that. He only knew the routine had changed, and he needed people to make it predictable again. I turned my face toward the window before Dad could see me cry.
Stetson came Tuesday, March seventeenth, after school with a backpack, a change of clothes, and the expression he wore when he’d decided something was happening whether anyone approved or not. Dad offered him the foldout chair. Stetson tested it, declared it an instrument of medieval punishment, and asked the nurse whether he was allowed to stay overnight. Once the unit confirmed the arrangement, he settled in beside the window.
He did biology homework with his knees pulled up and complained about a diagram of cellular respiration. I couldn’t answer, so he supplied my side of the argument too. Apparently I thought his mitochondria looked like sad potatoes. For the record, they did.
When the lights went down, he kept the small lamp on near his chair so the nurses could move around without waking us both. I drifted in and out of sleep, waking whenever the pump sounded or someone came to check my temperature.
Just after midnight, the pump alarm chirped. Stetson sat up, blinking at the screen. For one awful second I thought he’d reach for it. Instead he pressed the call button and told the nurse what the display said when she came in. He waited until she had sorted it out before settling back down.
The next time I woke, he was watching me from the chair. “What?” I whispered. It came out like sandpaper.
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.” He rubbed his face, then gave up pretending. “Actually, there’s something I need to tell you. And since you can’t interrupt me without hurting yourself, this is probably my only chance to finish a sentence.”
I gave him the finger beneath the blanket. He saw it anyway.
He looked at his hands. “That night in October, when the ambulance came? I slept through you calling Dad. I didn’t wake up until everybody was already in your room.” He swallowed. “I didn’t even know anything was wrong.”
I remembered his face in the doorway. I’d barely thought about it since. He’d been carrying it for months.
“Then I found out Chandler had known you were hurting for weeks. He’s the one who got you off the gravel behind the bleachers. He tried to get you to tell somebody. I was your twin, and I missed it.”
He picked at a loose thread on his sleeve. “I was mad at him for seeing what I didn’t. That’s the part I’m not proud of. Chandler was trying to help you, and all I could think about was how I should’ve noticed first.” He finally looked up. “I treated it like some kind of competition when it wasn’t one. You needed both of us.”
I reached for my phone and opened the notes app. Typing took longer than it should have. Why didn’t you tell me?
“Because I was embarrassed. And then I kept putting it off.” He leaned forward. “I’m sorry, Sloane. I was weird with him for weeks. You probably didn’t notice. You were kind of busy having cancer.”
I looked at the screen. My first instinct was to type that it didn’t matter because we’d broken up. Instead, I wrote something worse: He’s better off without me. I showed him the words.
Stetson read them and let out a breath through his nose. “You keep saying that like you’ve taken a vote and everyone agreed.”
I turned the phone back around. He lost training because of me.
“He missed training because he chose to go with you. Maybe it was a bad call. Maybe he needs to fix things with Hartman. That’s his job.” Stetson lowered his voice. “You can be angry that he didn’t tell you. You can break up with him. But you don’t get to decide what he feels.”
I hated how reasonable he sounded. Stetson wasn’t supposed to be the reasonable twin. We had an arrangement.
He sat back, then glanced at the window. “You know what he did on his birthday?”
I shook my head.
“He went to Blue Heron Lake. His location’s still shared with me, so I found him there after dark.” Stetson’s jaw worked for a second. “I thought he might want company. He said he was okay, but he wasn’t. He let me sit in the Jeep with him for a while before he told me to go home.”
I’d spent that afternoon typing and deleting messages while imagining Chandler alone on the bench. I’d been right about where he was. Wrong about everything else.
“I’m not telling you so you’ll feel guilty,” Stetson said. “He didn’t ask me to. I’m telling you because you’re both acting like caring about someone means making their choices for them.”
I let the phone drop onto the blanket. My throat hurt too much to argue, and the worst part was that I wasn’t sure I could have argued even if it hadn’t.
On Wednesday, March eighteenth, Angelina came in to check my fluids and ask whether the pain medicine was helping. I managed a thumbs-up that was only a little dishonest. She adjusted my pillows, then smiled at Stetson, who’d fallen asleep with his biology textbook open across his chest.
“Your brother’s been a good helper,” she said. “And you’ve got quite a crew checking on you. Your dad said you’re taking a break from visitors, so we’ve been following that. A boy came by the family waiting area last night with your Uncle Jake. They left a card with your brother. No pressure to see anyone.”
My heart kicked once, hard. Stetson was awake now. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a small envelope, already bent at one corner. He set it on my tray without comment. Chandler’s handwriting was on the front. Just my name.
For a long time, I didn’t touch it. Chandler wasn’t forbidden from coming here. He’d never been forbidden. We’d broken up, and I’d asked him to stay away, and he’d done what I’d asked. The envelope didn’t change that.
It didn’t mean he wanted to get back together, either. I had to remind myself of that before I slid a finger under the flap.
Inside was a folded sheet of lined paper in Chandler’s handwriting. At the top he’d written Saturday plan, if Miss Davison wants it. Underneath were the exercises Dash still tolerated, the ones to skip if he got overwhelmed, and a note about asking the rescue whether the evaluation could be delayed. At the bottom, in smaller writing, was one more line.
You don’t have to answer. I just thought you’d want to know he’s still trying.
I read it twice. There was no grand speech, no demand that I forgive him, no declaration that he would wait forever. Just Dash, and a plan, and Chandler knowing what mattered to me even when we weren’t speaking.
Stetson watched me fold the page along its crease. “He asked me to give that to Dad. Dad said it was your choice whether to read it, so I held on to it.”
I picked up my phone. My fingers hovered over Chandler’s name, but I couldn’t make myself open the conversation. Not yet.
Instead, I typed a message to Miss Davison.
Me: Please ask the rescue about postponing. I want Dash to have a fair chance. Tell Chandler thank you for the plan.
I showed Dad before sending it. He read it, nodded, and handed the phone back.
Afterward I sat looking at the water cup on my tray. It was farther away than I could reach without pulling at my port line. I’d been pretending I wasn’t thirsty because asking for one more thing felt unbearable.
Stetson followed my gaze. “You want that?”
I nodded, and he brought it over, helped me sit a little higher without moving my left leg, and waited while I tried a careful sip. It still hurt. I managed it anyway. When I handed the cup back, he set it within easy reach and tucked the blanket around my feet.
“Three minutes older,” he said, picking up his biology book. “I’ve been carrying you my whole life, idiot.”
I wanted to tell him he was wrong. I wanted to tell him he was right. Instead I leaned back against the pillows and let him stay.