“Good. Good. I thought I was sort of like a test client for you.”

“There is that. But no! I mean, I like you. You’re decent. You have no agenda. You seem to like me.”

“I do. And that’s . . . that’s enough? To be friends?”

“It is for me.” He raised his eyebrows.

“Okay. It is for me, too. I just don’t want you to be here because you . . . pity me.”

Radley rolled his eyes. “Kid, we all have shit that rains down on us at different times. Your time is now. My time was getting beaten up in high school and having my parents tell me I was going to hell. Should we get Chinese? Korean? Thai? Italian?”

They ordered Thai food. Josh walked the two blocks to the nearest packie to pick up beer while Radley sat in a lounge chair in the rooftop garden and pretended to be Leonardo DiCaprio (in his own words).

When he came back, it was a little bit of a shock, seeing the not-Lauren things in the living room. His heart hurt.

But she would like Radley. Would have liked. She’d be glad he had a friend. That he was (oh, detested phrase) moving on.

Tomorrow, he would apologize to Sarah. For now, he tucked the six-pack under his arm and went up on the roof to join his buddy. Like a normal person, no matter how empty his soul felt.

18

Lauren

Twenty-one months left

May 19

Dear Dad,

I think this diagnosis is kind of wrong. I mean, I believe the doctors, but I doubt very much I’m like the other patients. I’m not even thirty, for God’s sake. I’m about to turn twenty-seven. They keep saying they don’t know how this will play out.

 It’s really not that bad, to be honest. I’m fine. I’m really fine.

 Just wanted you to know.

 Love,

 Lauren

She was fine. Until she wasn’t.

In June, six months after the diagnosis, she was doing great. IPF and its grim facts lurked in her closet like a childhood monster, amorphous and dark, waiting. But that monster had never eaten her, had it? So then. Everything made sense.

Because it didn’t seem possible that she had something incurable. She’d never even heard of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Some days, she felt perfectly normal. Better than normal, even. So how could her lungs be changing, huh? Hm? Hadn’t she given Sebastian a piggyback ride? Hadn’t she and Josh had marathon sex the other day?

She was slaying at work, proving herself again and again. How could she be dying if she was the company’s best exterior space designer? Bruce had just assigned her to a big job for a new T stop in Boston, and she’d spent the day in Beantown, all alone, watching people come and go, reading the pedestrian traffic flow report and staring at the ugly entrance. She was fine. Fine, damn it.

There had to be a mistake. She was just waiting for Dr. Bennett to figure it out.

Of course, there were days when she had to drink two cappuccinos to make it through the workday (but everyone had those days). Days when the thought of taking two flights of stairs to their apartment felt Sisyphean, and her legs felt like lead, and she felt dizzy and weak. But, hello! Hadn’t she also made it through a power yoga class? So what if she was short of breath sometimes? She could deal with it. She was dealing with it. She was on medication and had an inhaler. Not a big deal. So many people were in the same shoes.

No matter what she Googled, she could not find a case of IPF where the person had been cured. Not one.

That was fine. She would adapt to having a low blood oxygen level. No one could tell her she wasn’t going to live a long life. No one. She was freakishly young to have this disease . . . not the only one, but one of the very few. She joined an online forum and talked with other young people with IPF. They agreed; no one was planning any funerals, no sir.

Except all of them used oxygen. All of them had been hospitalized and intubated multiple times.

See? She must not have IPF. She’d never been intubated. Never spent a single night in the hospital.

Until she did.

Lauren had been having a completely normal day at work when she felt something . . . shift in her chest. Something weird, something she’d never felt before. A heaviness. A difference.

She pulled in a breath, but it was off. It was . . . wrong. Her chest jerked, and then fire flashed through it. Suddenly her back twisted in agony—was it a heart attack, did someone just wallop her with a two-by-four?

She sucked in air, but it wasn’t enough. Panic slapped her hard, and she tried again, but no, nothing. Was this a nightmare? Wake up! Wake up! Her chest was working, up and down, up and down, almost like she was choking on something, but deeper down. Oh, God, she was going to die.

She pushed back her chair and said, “Call . . . 911 . . .” and slid to the floor, buzzing with adrenaline, but utterly weak. Her hands flailed near her throat, pulling at her collar, and God, the pain! Her chest hurt like nothing she’d ever felt before, like someone had rammed an arrow clear through her. Her back was spasming in torment, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe.

She fought. She fought like a wild animal in a trap, gasping in horrible wrenching sounds, her legs flailing, foot connecting with Santino as he tried to help her sit up. Her coworkers gathered round, saying things, putting their hands on her, but she couldn’t hear them, she was heaving and the sounds that were coming out of her—animal sounds, desperate and feral—drowned out everything.

Louise was on the phone, yelling. “My coworker can’t breathe! She has a lung problem and she can’t breathe! She’s dying! Hurry up, hurry up!”

“Somebody do something!” Bruce yelled. “Where the fuck is the ambulance? Somebody, help her! Jesus Christ!”

Josh. She was going to die without Josh. She fought harder, kicking, gasping.