Then the medication stopped working.
It happened fast. It usually does, at the end.
Her blood counts dropped. The fevers came back. The new drug we’d been counting on, the one we’d fought the insurance company for three weeks to approve, didn’t touch it.
On a Tuesday afternoon in April, Dr. Patel, the attending oncologist, sat down with Alicia’s family in the little family room at the end of the hall. Alicia’s mother. Her aunt. Her older sister, Nora.
I stood in the back.
Dr. Patel told them, gently, that Alicia likely had about three days.
Nora made a sound I’ll never forget. Like something tearing.
Afterward, I hesitated outside Alicia’s room. For a long time. I stood in the hallway with my hand on the door frame.
I had no new treatment to offer her. Nothing. And I dreaded walking in there and seeing her look up at me, waiting for one.
When I finally went in, she was propped up on her pillows. A blue jay half-drawn on the menu in her lap.
She didn’t ask me about treatment.
She asked me to sit down.
I pulled the chair up next to the bed.
“I have one last wish,” she said.
“What is it?”
“I want to marry you.”
I thought she was joking. Of course I did.
She smiled at me. Weakly. Her lips were cracked.
“Come on, Dr. Lucas,” she said. “I don’t want to show up in heaven as an unmarried woman. My grandma will never let me hear the end of it.”
“Alicia,” I said. “I’m your doctor.”
“You’re not who I’d pick if I was marrying for love, doc,” she said.
She glanced past me, out through the glass window in the door. A nurse was walking by in the hallway. Tomás, the night nurse, who always brought her extra pudding cups.
Her cheeks went pink.
Then she looked back at me.
“But I have my reasons.”
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.