Chapter 13 - THE FIRST GOOD SCAN
The first good scan came on a Tuesday morning when I had stopped expecting good news to arrive without ambushing me first.
Dr. Greene sat across from me with the imaging report and used careful words: encouraging response, measurable reduction, continue present protocol, still early. No promises. No miracle language.
But the disease burden had gone down.
I cried before he finished the sentence.
Holly didn’t fully understand the scan report, but she understood my face. “That’s a good cry,” she said from the bed.
“Yes,” I told her, laughing through tears. “That’s a very good cry.”
The hospital allows a lot of sorrow. Joy echoes strangely there, like it has to relearn the walls.
Calvin brought her a stuffed penguin wearing a tiny Boston Children’s sweatshirt. Aunt Jill mailed a ridiculous set of glitter pens. Dr. Greene even smiled, briefly, which felt almost medically significant.
Outside the hospital, life kept sorting the wreckage.
Derek remained in custody until his family scraped together enough for release conditions. No one in my family helped. His brother called once to say Derek was “under extreme pressure and made awful choices.” Laura advised me not to respond, so I didn’t.
Vanessa entered into a cooperation agreement and moved in with a church friend outside Worcester. She sent one letter to me—not asking forgiveness, just saying the baby was a girl and that she now understood what it meant to choose yourself over a child. I did not write back.
At night, when the hospital quieted, the unanswered emotional questions got louder.
Why had my mother protected me with a trust but not with the whole truth sooner?
How many birthdays had Derek attended while still sleeping with Vanessa?
Would Holly someday need to know every ugly detail about how her father treated her illness?
Calvin answered the first question better than I expected.
“Your mother didn’t choose silence because she trusted Derek,” he said. “She chose structure because she didn’t trust what telling you then would have done to your life.”
Maybe.
I was not fully at peace with her choice.
But I was grateful for its architecture.
That night, after Holly fell asleep with the penguin tucked under one arm and Captain Bun under the other, I opened my phone and saw the updated custody motion Laura had drafted.
Full physical custody.
Supervised contact only if medically approved later.
No unsupervised access to Holly’s records, accounts, or treatment team.
A scan had improved.
May you like
The legal future was getting clearer.
And for the first time, I let myself imagine a world in which Holly lived long enough to outgrow the hospital gowns folded in the cabinet beside her bed.
