“So you came for a DNA test,” I said bitterly.
“No.” He shook his head hard. “No. Let me finish. Please.”
I waited.
“Yesterday afternoon, I called Dr. Hale. My oncologist. The same one from when I was nineteen. He’s almost retired, but he still had my number. And I told him everything. And he said, come in. Today. Sunday. He opened his office on a Sunday for me.” Ben took a shaky breath. “He ran the tests again. For the first time in eleven years. I never went back after the first time. I never checked again. I was too scared. I didn’t want to hear it twice.”
“And?” my mom asked softly from beside me.
Ben looked at me.
“It’s low,” he said. “My count. Really low. He said it would be hard. That it was very unlikely. But it’s not zero, Claire. It’s not zero. He said that sometimes, years after chemo, things recover a little. He said it’s rare, but it happens. He said he’s seen it.” His voice broke completely. “He said if I’d come back even once, in all those years, I would have known it was possible. All this time. It was possible all this time. And I never even checked.”
