Chapter 7 - Twelve Months
Treatment started on a Tuesday in October.
I drove him. He never asked — he'd only mentioned the appointment the night before in that new, careful way he'd started using since the kitchen conversation, like he was still relearning how much room he was allowed to take up in his own marriage. I just said, "What time do we need to leave?"
He looked at me for a second, surprised, then said, "Seven-thirty."
The clinic sat forty minutes outside town. We didn't talk much on the drive. He had a thermos of coffee, I had one of tea, and the radio played something neither of us was actually listening to until he reached over and shut it off.
"Better," he said.
"Better," I agreed.
The waiting room had thin-cushioned chairs and a television mounted too high on the wall, muted, running a morning news segment nobody watched. An older man across from us read a paperback. A woman near the window, maybe late thirties, sat with her eyes closed and her hands folded in her lap.
Marcus watched her a moment. "She looks calm," he said quietly.
"Maybe she's done this before."
"Maybe that's what calm looks like after a while."
I didn't answer. I just put my hand over his on the armrest. He turned his palm up and held on.
The months that followed weren't a straight line. Nobody warns you about that — that illness doesn't move forward evenly, that you can have three normal-feeling weeks and then one Tuesday that undoes all of them at once.
Marcus had good stretches and brutal ones. A week in December where the exhaustion knocked him flat for twelve hours a night and he still woke up drained. A week in January where something lifted and he almost felt like himself again — though by then I'd learned not to trust the good weeks too much, because the hard ones always circled back.
Eleanor started calling on Sundays. She'd never once called first in three years — always waited for Marcus to reach out, like initiating contact was a concession she wasn't willing to make. Now she called at eleven sharp every Sunday morning, and some weeks she and I talked for ten minutes before Marcus even got on the line.
Small things. The garden she was trying to start. A book she thought I'd like. Once, carefully, something closer to an apology: "I want you to know I've been thinking about what I said. About not trusting you. I was wrong."
"I know," I said.
"I wanted to say it out loud."
"I heard you," I said. "Thank you."
It wasn't forgiveness exactly. It was something more useful than forgiveness — an agreement to be different from here on out. To actually try.
Marcus's brother, Connor, came to visit in February. He showed up with grocery bags and cooked dinner without being asked, then sat in the living room with Marcus while I cleaned the kitchen. I could hear them through the wall — not the words, just the easy rhythm of two brothers talking without performing for anyone. I stood at the sink and felt something in my chest loosen that I hadn't realized had been clenched for months.
In March, Marcus had his first round of follow-up imaging. Same drive, same silence, same two thermoses. Radio off before we even reached the end of our street.
Same thin-cushioned chairs in the waiting room. A different man reading a different paperback. The same television too high on the wall.
We waited an hour and forty minutes. When the doctor finally sat down across from us and set the folder between us, I watched Marcus's face instead of the folder, because his face would tell me the truth before a single word left her mouth.
His shoulders dropped. Not in defeat.
In relief.
"The imaging shows a significant response to treatment," the doctor said. "Better than our most optimistic projection at this stage."
Marcus let out a long, slow breath through his nose. I kept my hand on his arm.
"What does that mean for the next phase?" I asked.
She explained. I listened closely and asked three follow-up questions, writing the answers in the small notebook I'd started carrying to every appointment. Marcus watched me write and didn't say a word, but when we stood to leave, he rested his hand briefly against my back — just a second, just a touch — and I understood exactly what it meant.
In the car, he was quiet a long time. Then he said, "When this is over, I want to take you somewhere. Somewhere you've always wanted to go."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't have to." He glanced over. "Where would you go? If you could pick anywhere."
I thought about it. "Somewhere with a coast," I said. "Somewhere I can actually hear the water."
"Okay," he said. "That's it. Done."
"Just okay?"
May you like
"I'm already looking it up when we get home." He almost smiled. "I've got a lot to make up for."
"You do," I said. But I was almost smiling too.
