Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 40814 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 204(@200wpm)___ 163(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40814 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 204(@200wpm)___ 163(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
“We learn the alphabet,” she finishes the saying for me. We picked up a book of foreign euphemisms and they’ve become our inside jokes. The Romanian rhyme about keeping on, keeping on had landed close to home with both of us.
She joins me by my side and we do exactly as we said, little by little. Doing the work of research scientists. It’s far from glorious. We make incremental changes and test. Experiment after experiment. Some fail, some show promise. More incremental changes. More testing.
We’d be down in this airless basement for days on end if I let us. So it’s always me keeping my eye on the clock and dragging an always tired Daphne away from her work. To eat. For her mandatory afternoon nap.
Even when she’s obviously run ragged, she refuses to acknowledge her own limits. I want to throttle her for not protecting herself and at the same time I want to wrap her in so many blankets and put her on a pedestal where no one can touch her and nothing bad could ever happen to her.
I’m always fighting two wars—against the actual disease and against Daphne’s stubbornness. She’s determined to have her big life, now. And I want to give it to her… As long as it doesn’t interfere with her long-term recovery. Something she can lose sight of in the moment when she’s lost in research or lost in my body.
And we are having so much sex. Every night, that’s a given. No matter how tired she is, she begs me to take her. Sometimes that means getting creative with how the pillows are arranged so she can just lay back and let me do the heavy lifting. Other times it means tying her down to the bed so tight she couldn’t twitch a muscle even if she wanted to.
So, we’re managing to figure it out…
But for how long? That’s the thought that keeps me awake at fucking night. Everything’s too good right now. And in my life, nothing good ever lasts.
“Logan? Logan?”
My head jerks up and I look her direction. “What?”
Daphne looks at me quizzically. “I asked if you were done with that sample.” She reaches out a gloved hand.
“Oh, right.” I take the slide off of the microscope I’m looking at and hand it over to her.
She slips it into her machine and is immediately intent, examining it through the illuminated scope. She shakes her head, watching the same drama I watched a hundred times as it plays out. Our super T cell is introduced into a colony of diseased Battleman’s cells.
While our super T cell begins to attack the diseased cells, it simply doesn’t have staying power. It clones itself a few times but then all the clones die and the Battleman’s continues to torture for another day.
I don’t know how Daphne doesn’t shove away from the table and throw the damn microscope at the wall. I was tempted a few times in the middle of the night last night.
Daphne moves a few dials on the microscope to get a better view and then shakes her head. “They are so volatile,” she whispers. Then she grins up at me. “Our super cells are like Logan cells right now. Hot, angry, wanting to take out the opponent right away.”
I puff out my chest. “And what’s wrong with that?”
She raises an eyebrow at me. “It doesn’t always get the job done. This is going to require patience. And time.”
Then her eyes go distant and she starts to tap her teeth with the tip of her nails. A classic Daphne tell that she’s having a big idea.
“The current serum is made from the distilled essence from the x hybrida rose, right? From pulped petals and blossoms?”
Her bright green flecked eyes come to mine, lit with excitement. “But what if it’s like the yew tree?”
“The what now?”
“Taxol, from the yew tree!”
She zooms backwards and turns so fast with her wheelchair that she almost pulls a wheelie on her way over to a computer in the corner. I can barely keep up with her.
By the time I join her, she’s already got several webpages pulled up.
“Oh, Taxol.” I thought the name sounded familiar, but now that I see what she’s pulled up, I’m reminded of exactly where I’ve seen the name. It’s also a non-chemotherapy drug, developed from— “the bark of yew trees,” I remember out loud.
“Exactly,” Daphne says like I just solved the puzzle.
“What does that have to do with us?”
But Daphne has buzzed to the other side of the room and is pulling out several three-ring binders of old experiments off the shelf. She’s skimming through and discarding almost as fast as she can pull them down.
“Daph, what are you looking for?”
“I know when we first discovered the oncologic applications for the hybrida essence, Belladonna did studies on the properties of the entire plant. Where are those? Are they only at the Belladonna offices?”