chef when he came to reclaim it. Ian had his own office in her house now, and he came and went as he chose without comment from her.
They had been together for four years. Coco was twenty-eight, and Ian forty-five, and he stood in as a benevolent uncle to Bethanie. They still had long conversations over breakfast every day before she went to school. She called him Mr. Ian, as he had told her to, which was a joke between them, since he didn’t want to be her stand-in father, although in many ways he was, whether he admitted it or not. And Leslie and Coco had a chic office in Knightsbridge now, and ran a very successful business.
Ian and Coco were just back from a weekend in Prague, and Coco found Bethanie listless when she got home. She was running a fever. She thought it was the flu, gave her some medicine to bring the fever down, but she was worse the next day. She called the pediatrician, and it persisted for a week. The doctor suggested Coco bring her in, and maybe run a few tests. It could be strep, mononucleosis, or a number of other things, or just a nasty virus. Coco drove her to the doctor on the fifth day. They did a blood draw. Coco took her for some ice cream and a balloon afterward, and Bethanie didn’t want to get out of the car.
Ian reassured Coco that night, but she didn’t like the way Bethanie looked. She worried about things like meningitis, but her pediatrician had reassured her that she’d be much sicker if she had that, or even dead by then, which sent chills down Coco’s spine.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Ian said when they went to bed that night, and in the morning there was no change. It was unnerving waiting for the test results. The doctor called when Coco was about to leave for work on Monday. She had a meeting and the nanny was there to be with Bethanie, who had stayed home from school again.
The doctor sounded concerned when Coco answered the phone. “I don’t have good news,” she said. “Something turned up in the bloodwork that I didn’t expect.”
“Meningitis?” Coco sounded panicked. Ian wasn’t back from the gym yet. He had errands to do that morning.
“No. She has too many white blood cells and too few red blood cells. She could be showing the early signs of leukemia.” She said the words and Coco felt them like a knife piercing her heart. Bethanie had had a checkup recently with no sign of it. “I’d like to get her in to see an oncologist today if possible. We should get on this quickly.” Coco felt like she was going to faint and had to sit down.
“Oh my God. How could that happen?”
“It does. It’s the second case I’ve seen recently. I’ll call you back after I speak to the oncologist and find out when he can see you.”
She called back half an hour later. “He said to bring her in now. Can you do that?”
“Of course.” The doctor gave her the address, and she picked Bethanie up in her pajamas, put a coat over them, and settled her in the car, in her car seat. She left the house in less than ten minutes, and Coco called Leslie to say she wasn’t coming in.
They were at the doctor fifteen minutes later. Coco carried Bethanie inside and set her down gently in the waiting room. She was afraid of another blood draw, and Bethanie started to cry as soon as Coco set her down. A nurse distracted her with a balloon and a toy, and they waited to see the oncologist, who examined Bethanie, and looked at the tests the pediatrician had sent him. He met with Coco in his office, while the nurse played with Bethanie in the exam room, but all she wanted to do was lie down and clutch the blanket she had brought with her.
Coco looked at the doctor across his desk. “How bad is it?” Bethanie was the love of her life, and the only family she had. The doctor could see all of it in Coco’s eyes.
“It’s not good. I don’t like it. I never do. I’d like to get a spinal tap and a bone marrow biopsy. That should tell us the whole story. If it is leukemia, we have good results with children Bethanie’s age, depending on what kind it is.”