Page 92 of Cruel Submission

“Yeah.”

“You’re already crying.”

I swipe at my cheek, surprised. She’s right. Tears sliding down without my permission, my body responding before my mind catches up.

“Bloody hormones,” I mutter.

Debra reaches across the seat and takes my hand. Her grip is lighter now—less desperate. More deliberate. She’s choosing to hold on, not clinging out of panic, and the difference is everything.

“We walk in together,” she says. “We sit on either side of his bed. And we let him see that his girls are home.”

I nod. My throat is too thick to speak.

Volodya navigates the last few streets toward St. Mary’s. The hospital rises ahead of us—gray concrete and fluorescent promise, the building I’ve come to know far too intimately these last few months. I’ve memorized the cracks in the car park walls. The vending machine on the third floor that eats coins but gives nothing back. The squeak of the oncology ward door.

“One more thing,” I say as the car slows.

Debra looks at me.

“If he starts fading—if the machines beep or the nurses come in—we don’t panic. We stay calm. We hold his hands. We let him know we’re there.” My lungs feel lined with grit, every inhale costing something. “And if this is the last time, then we make it count.”

Debra’s eyes are bright. Wet. Fierce.

“We’ll make it count,” she says.

Volodya pulls into the car park. Through the windshield, I catch a glimpse of a man in plainclothes leaning against a pillar near the entrance. Casual. Reading a newspaper. But his posture is too straight, and his shoes are wrong for a civilian—polished, functional, the kind men wear when they might need to run.

Arkady’s men. Close enough to intervene, far enough not to disturb. Just like he promised.

But there are more of them than I expected. Another by the stairwell. A woman near the ticket machine who isn’t buying a ticket. For a simple hospital visit, Arkady’s deployed what looks like a small army.

I open the door. Cold air rushes in, carrying antiseptic and exhaust and something sweet from the café on the ground floor. My daughter kicks, hard, as if she knows where we are.

“Ready?” I ask Debra.

She steps out of the car. Pulls the sleeves of her cardigan down over her wrists—a protective gesture, covering skin she doesn’t want the world to see—and lifts her chin.

“Ready.”

We walk toward the entrance side by side. Mirror images. Dad’s girls, coming home.

Chapter Thirty

Mirabel

The oncology ward never changes.

Same squeak of the linoleum under my trainers. Same fluorescent light humming overhead. Same sharp smell—bleach layered over something organic.

But I’ve changed. Last time I walked this corridor alone, pretending I wasn’t falling apart. Now I’m walking it with my twin sister beside me, her shoulder brushing mine every third step, and the pretending is a different kind altogether.

We round the corner toward Dad’s room, and I spot Dad’s oncologist, Dr. Klein, before he spots us.

He’s standing by the nurses’ station, one hand on the counter, speaking quietly with a ward nurse. His reading glasses are pushed up into his hair, and there’s a paper cup of something lukewarm and institutional in his other hand. He’s one of those men whose calm fills whatever room he’s in. Unflappable in the way surgeons and bomb disposal experts aspire to be.

Except today, something sits behind his expression. A weight. Not panic—Dr. Klein doesn’t do panic—but a cloudiness I haven’t seen on him before.

He turns at the sound of our footsteps. The cloudiness clears into recognition.