Chapter 1 — The Note on the Counter

We took the treatment money for the cruise.

You can handle Walt when you get back.

We’re sick of taking care of him.

That was the note my mother left for me, in her round, careless handwriting, on the kitchen counter.

I had been home in Pensacola for less than a minute.

I am a Navy flight surgeon, and I had spent the better part of nine months rotating through hard shifts and emergency transfers and a long medical support deployment at sea.

For all those months, through all of it, the thing I had held onto — the picture I fell asleep on — was walking through my own front door and putting my arms around my family, and most of all around Walt.

My stepfather.

The man who had raised me as his own from the time I was eight years old.

Instead, I unlocked the door onto a house that was freezing, and dark, and silent.

“Walt?” I called.

Nothing came back.

Chapter 2 — How I Found Him

I dropped my bag in the hall and went to his room, and I will not describe in detail what I found there, because he was a dignified man and he would not want it described.

It is enough to say that he had been left alone and cold for days, that he was badly dehydrated, that he could barely lift his voice above a whisper.

Walt had late-stage pancreatic cancer.

He needed help to sit up.