“Babe?” Pax’s voice would come through in a whisper on my cell, waking me from where I had fallen asleep sitting up in the Davis’s den. “Yeah?” I’d answer, checking the clock in the dark. “Just wanted to see how you’re holding up.” He called every night from DC, as if determined not to let me go an hour where I could be wondering if this was all too much for him—how we collided from estrangement to cancer in a single day. “I’m the same,” I’d whisper back. “It’s the same.” I’d stumble out to find Tom by himself on the living room couch staring at the wall, his expression inscrutable, and think, who can he express his fear to? Who does he have? Belle? That was laughable. Who could he fall apart on? He had to be the strongest of all of us. While we waited for the test results to find out if the cancer had spread everything at the office came to a standstill, except a string of fundraising meetings that had been months in the making. After much agonizing, Tom decided it would be in poor taste for him to attend and that Brian should go to keep things moving, with me along to assist. “You want the radio?”
