Walter stared at the black-and-white image of his own insides. There it was: a small, irregular knot of shadow, like a splinter caught between the ribs. His cells had turned against him quietly, methodically, the same way he had turned against his own ambition.
Dr. Delcavoli removed his glasses. "Without treatment, six months. With aggressive therapy, maybe two years."
He drove himself to the imaging center, not because he was brave, but because he couldn't afford an ambulance. The CT scanner hummed around him, and the technician—a young woman with purple-streaked hair—asked if he had any family history of lung cancer. Walter said no, but his father had died of emphysema. She made a note. He felt the cold burn of contrast dye spreading through his veins like a lie taking hold.
The cough, in the end, was the smallest part of it. The real cancer wasn't in his lungs. It had been growing for decades—the resentment, the genius turned to drudgery, the quiet fury of a man who had broken bad in his heart long before his body ever did. The tumor was just the catalyst.
It was the last honest thing he ever told her.
He looked up. For a moment, she saw something in his eyes she didn't recognize. Not sadness. Not fear. Calculation.
The breaking point came on a Sunday. He was folding laundry—a chore he actually liked for its quiet geometry—when a spasm bent him double. He caught himself on the dresser, and when he pulled his hand away, his palm was stippled with fine red mist.
"Nothing," he said. "I'm fine."