"The doctor gave my six-year-old twins ten days to live, but that afternoon a penniless woman appeared at my gates claiming she knew how to save them—and she knew a secret about their mother that no one should have known.

Miriam started the correct treatment at seven that morning.

By evening, Blythe's color had changed.

It was a small thing — the faintest return of warmth to her face — but I had been watching her for eighteen months and I knew the difference between her skin on a bad day and her skin on a day when her body was fighting back.

I sat between their beds and didn't go to my office.

Jonah woke up at four in the afternoon and looked at me with eyes that were slightly clearer than they'd been in weeks.

"Dad.

You look terrible."

"Thank you, Jonah."

"Did you sleep?"

"Not much."

He considered this.

"Bly said she dreamed about Mom last night."

My chest tightened.

"What did she dream?"

"She said Mom was in a garden.

She said Mom told her the garden was very nice but she wasn't allowed to come in yet." He looked at his sister.

"Bly said she was annoyed about it."

I almost laughed.

It came out wrong — too close to something else — but Jonah didn't seem to mind.

"That sounds like your mother," I said.

"Yeah." He settled back against the pillow.

"Dad?"

"Yes."

"Are we going to be okay?"

I looked at him.

At the small serious face that had Genevieve's eyes and my stubbornness and six years of being braver than any child should have to be.

"Yes," I said.

"You're going to be okay."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

He closed his eyes.

Three doors down, Nora was sitting in the family room with a cup of tea she hadn't touched.

I found her there at six, the cup cold, her hands wrapped around it anyway.

"Miriam says the preliminary numbers are already improving," I said.

Nora looked up.

Her eyes were red at the edges, but her face was composed.

"How much?"

"Enough.

She says seventy-two hours."

Nora set the cup down carefully.

Her hands were shaking slightly.

She pressed them flat against the table.

"Genevieve would have—" She stopped.

Started again.

"She spent the last year of her life trying to get to this moment.

Trying to make sure they'd be all right."

"I know."

"She loved them so much.

She never stopped—" Her voice broke.

Not loudly.

Just a fracture, quickly controlled.

I sat down across from her.

"She loved you too," I said.

"She told me once, early on, that the hardest thing about leaving her old life was leaving her mother.

She never told me why you were estranged.

I didn't know it was her father who caused it.

I should have asked more."

Nora shook her head.

"She was protecting everyone.

Always." A tear moved down her face and she didn't wipe it.

"She was like that as a girl.

She used to take the blame for things her brother did so he wouldn't get in trouble.

I used to tell her — Genevieve, you cannot carry everyone.

She'd just smile."

"She smiled at me like that too," I said.

"When I was worried about something I couldn't fix.

Like she knew something I didn't."

"Maybe she did."

We sat with that for a while.

Outside, the evening was settling over the grounds.

The cameras swept their arcs.

The guards moved through their rotations.

The same walls, the same wire, the same reinforced glass.

But the thing that had been inside those walls — the slow quiet harm moving through my children's bl00d — was finally being undone.

On the second day, Blythe opened her eyes and asked for toast.

Miriam came to find me in the corridor, and for the first time in eighteen months, the expression on a doctor's face in this building was something other than careful neutrality.

"Their counts are responding," she said.

"Both of them."

I put my hand against the wall.

"Say that again."