When I demanded to know how she had obtained it, Elena looked directly at me and said, “Your wife gave it to me three weeks before she died,” forcing me to confront an impossible truth because Genevieve’s death had supposedly been sudden.
Elena then placed a folded medical report on my desk and explained that Genevieve had made her promise to find my children if anything happened to her, and across the top of that report were Jonah and Blythe’s names beside a date from one year before their birth.
According to the report, Genevieve had discovered a rare inherited immune abnormality while undergoing fertility testing, something capable of making standard leukemia treatment dangerously ineffective, but the document also described an experimental donor protocol that had shown extraordinary results in genetically matched relatives.
I immediately called Dr.
Yates, but when he entered the room and saw Elena, the color vanished from his face so quickly that even she noticed, and for the first time since my children became ill, I wondered whether their doctor was frightened of something besides cancer.
Yates claimed the report was outdated and unreliable, insisting Genevieve had never disclosed such testing, yet Elena calmly opened her bag and produced another document bearing his signature beneath a recommendation that the Mercer children be screened immediately after birth.
