“Why not? Apparently everyone in this hospital is allowed to know except your wife.”

“That wasn’t what I wanted.”

“Then what did you want?”

He looked toward the window.

“To fix it.”

The answer was so perfectly Marcus that it hurt.

He fixed things.

Broken deck boards.

Leaking sinks.

Lily’s bicycle chain.

Failing hearts.

He had spent his entire adult life believing that if he worked hard enough, studied long enough, stayed calm enough, nothing had to remain broken.

Except now the broken thing was him.

“The first chemotherapy put me into remission,” he said quietly. “For eleven weeks.”

My anger faltered.

“Then?”

“It came back.”

I covered my mouth.

“We tried another regimen. It didn’t work.”

“How bad?”

He hesitated.

That hesitation frightened me more than anything he had said.

“Marcus.”

“I need a stem-cell transplant.”

“Then you get one.”

“It isn’t that simple.”

“It is to me.”

A faint, heartbroken smile crossed his face.

“The registry hasn’t produced a good adult match.”

“Then we keep looking.”

“We are.”

“What about family?”

“My brother isn’t compatible.”

“And Lily?”

Silence.

Something passed across his face.

Not grief.

Not exactly.

Fear.

A different kind of fear.

I lowered my hand.

“What about Lily?”

Marcus stared at the floor.

When he finally spoke, his voice had changed.

“That’s the part I didn’t know how to tell you.”

I thought I had already heard the worst thing a wife could hear.

I was wrong.

Two days earlier, Marcus explained, the transplant team had tested Lily to determine whether she could potentially become a haploidentical donor in the future.

She was only eight, so using her would have required exceptional circumstances and layers of ethical review.

They had expected the screening to confirm the obvious.

That Lily was his biological daughter.

Instead, the laboratory called David.

Then they repeated the test.

Then they repeated it again using a new sample.

Marcus handed me a folded sheet of paper.

I refused to take it.

“Say it.”

“Claire.”

“Say it.”

His eyes filled with tears.

“Lily isn’t biologically mine.”

For a moment I simply stared at him.

Then I slapped him.

The sound cracked through the room.

Marcus did not move.

Neither did I.

My palm burned.

He turned his face slowly back toward me.

“I deserved that.”

“You think I cheated on you?”

“No.”

The answer came instantly.

That stopped me.

“I have never—”

“I know.”

“Not once.”

“I know.”

“Then what are you saying?”

Marcus stood.

He looked dizzy immediately and gripped the edge of the table.

I almost reached for him.

Almost.

He opened a drawer beside the hospital bed and removed another report.

“This is yours.”

“What?”

“I asked David to run your sample too.”