Chapter nine

Julie wasn't a match.

Dr. Hana told me on a Tuesday morning, gently and carefully, the way she did everything, and I sat across from her and nodded and said the right things and drove home and sat in the parking garage for twenty minutes before I trusted myself to go upstairs.

Julie wasn't a match, which meant we were going to the registry, which meant time, and time was the one thing Jake didn't have in abundance.

I gave myself those twenty minutes in the parking garage, and then I went upstairs and made lunch and helped Jake build a train track across the living room floor and read them both a story at bedtime, and after they were asleep I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and started learning everything there was to know about bone marrow registries.

I became very good at it very quickly, because I had always been good at learning things I needed to know.

The weeks that followed had a particular shape to them.

On the surface, nothing changed. I went to set, I took meetings, I gave interviews, I attended the functions that Sloane Vale was expected to attend. Maya kept the schedule running, Marcus called about a new project, the trades wrote things about me that I didn't read.

Underneath all of it, I was running a search.

Dr. Hana had submitted Jake to the national registry and two international ones. I had hired a private medical coordinator, a woman named Dr. Patricia Osei who specialized in exactly this kind of case, and she was working every contact she had. I had donated to three bone marrow foundations in Jake's name and quietly made calls to people who knew people who might know something useful.

Every morning I woke up and checked my phone before I checked anything else, and every morning there was nothing.

Jake didn't know any of this. Jake knew he was taking new medicine and going to see Dr. Hana more often, and that his mother had taken to sitting on the edge of his bed longer than usual at night. He accepted all of it with the equanimity of a child who trusts completely that the adults in his life have things handled.

I was terrified of the day he stopped trusting that.

It was Ryan who finally said it out loud.

He'd driven up from Seattle on a Saturday, the way he sometimes did, and we were sitting in the kitchen after the twins had gone to bed, two cups of tea going cold between us, and he said it the way Ryan said difficult things, quietly and without cushioning.

"Have you thought about the biological father?"

I looked at my cup.

"Brynn."

"I've thought about it," I said.

"And?"

"And I'm not there yet."

Ryan was quiet for a moment. He had learned, over five years, which silences to push through and which ones to respect. "Patricia said the registry could take months. Jake doesn't have months to spare."

"I know what Patricia said."

"He wanted them gone," I said, before Ryan could speak again. "He told me to get rid of them. He signed away any claim, any connection. He doesn't even know they exist."

"I know."

"And you want me to walk back into his life and ask him for something."

"I want Jake to get better," Ryan said simply. "That's the only thing I want."

I picked up my tea, found it cold, and put it down again.

The thing was, I wanted that too. More than I had ever wanted anything in my life, more than the career, more than the reinvention, more than any of the things I had built so carefully in the years since I'd walked out of that house with a document pressed against my ribs.

"He might say no," I said.

"He might," Ryan agreed.

"He might not even test. He might have lawyers call me. He might go to the press."

"All of that might happen."

"And I'd have to see him again."

Ryan looked at me across the table, steady and patient as he had always been. "Yes," he said. "You would."

I sat with that for a long time, the quiet apartment around us, the sound of Jake's slightly labored breathing just audible through the wall.

"Not yet," I said finally. "Let Patricia keep working. Give it two more weeks."

Ryan nodded. He didn't argue, which was one of the things I had always valued most about him.

But we both knew two weeks wasn't a solution. It was just a delay, and we were both just counting down to the moment the delay ran out.