“But I’m not dead yet,” I whispered, horror making my voice soft. Or maybe that was the growing anger that wrapped itself around my throat, cutting my words in half.

His suit crinkled as he backed away, and he lifted a hand in a feckless, offhand farewell. “A part of me will always love you, Alena. Take care of yourself. I mean . . . as much as you can now. You know.” He shrugged, cleared his throat, and left the room.

The door whooshed shut behind him, the click of the latch signaling it was closed tight. I stared at the metal panel with the square window as I attempted to process the last ten minutes of my life. A week? It took him a week to find someone new and decide he would leave his dying wife in her hospital bed alone because some woman named Barbie told him it was a good idea?

“Tell me you didn’t hear that, Dahlia. Tell me I was dreaming.”

She sucked in a slow breath. “I’m sorry, honey. That totally happened. He’s a dickwad.”

There were no tears, of course, but the sobs in my chest were real enough and my bones creaked with the force of the shaking.

“Don’t cry over him, he doesn’t deserve it. Alena, don’t cry. You’ll hurt yourself,” Dahlia said, her voice soft and gentle.

“Take care of myself? What does he think is going to happen in the next few weeks? A magic damn cure? The doctors are going to come in here and wave a wand over us and that’s it, we’ll be all better?” The words exploded out of me, and while they hurt my throat, it was better than holding them in, letting them fester along with the pain in my heart.

Silence fell between us, or at least as silent as a hospital got. Outside our room the slap of feet on the cheap tile and the hum of voices drifted through the thick auto-closing door. Here the quiet was never real, rather an approximation of the big sleep that would soon come for us both.

Dahlia shifted and her bed creaked under her. “There is a magic cure. If you can afford it, you know.”

Again, I wondered if I was hearing things. “What?”

“It’s expensive, but if you’ve got the money . . . a warlock can help you.” Dahlia’s dark-green eyes locked with mine as they had so often over the last week.

“Dahlia, those are urban legends. I heard the rumors before I got sick too. I even saw that special exposé on TV. The Supe Conspiracy. That magic is the cure, and it’s only a matter of time before the world knows. But there is no way our government would allow so many people to die if they could help.”

She smiled, her pink gums shining between the few teeth she had left. “Really? Do you not pay attention at all? They’re trying to corral all the Super Dupers above the forty-ninth parallel. Keep them contained. The fewer there are south of the border, the better. They did the same thing in Europe and Asia, put up walls to keep the Supes contained in the middle, away from the humans. Every time someone is found to be a Supe, they ship them. My house isn’t far from the Wall, I’ve seen large vehicles cross the border more than once in the middle of the night.”

She leaned closer and I tried not to sigh. Dahlia was a confirmed conspiracy theorist. Aliens, monsters, government. You name it, she had a reason it wasn’t the way people thought.

Her green eyes locked on mine. “That Wall isn’t what they say it is. It isn’t protection for the Super Dupers. It’s confinement, like an oversized zoo. I’d think living so close to it, you’d know that too.”

My mind wandered. Maybe this time she was right. Seattle was close enough to the newly built Wall that I really should have known what it was all about. But Vanilla and Honey had taken all my time and attention. I’d barely seen outside my bakery for the last two years. Between the setup, launch, and day-to-day running of the bakery, I’d worked seven days a week, easily sixteen hours a day for almost my whole marriage. There was a reason my shop had been booming before I got sick; I’d given it everything I had.

Maybe I should have given more to Roger too? I didn’t want to think about it. He’d barely worked the last two years, happy to live off what I was doing. Happy to be at home and let me cook for him when I left the bakery. Happy.

I thought he’d been happy.

I sank into the thin pillow at my back. “Dahlia, I know what you’re doing.”

“What?”

“You’re a good friend, but you don’t have to distract me from what just happened. Roger . . . I was going to have to say good-bye anyway. Maybe this is better.” Those were the words I said, but they weren’t honest. I wanted to scream and rail against the injustice in life. To have my dream home, no financial burdens, running my own business, life had been too good. I should have known it would crash down around my ears. That the fates would deem my dreams and me a necessary casualty in the war of life.

My mother had been telling me for the last year that I was doing too well. That life would find a way to humble me. I plucked at the hole in my sheet. Humble. I’d never thought of myself as prideful, yet it looked like Mom was right.

Talk about hitting the bottom of the barrel and crashing on through to the other side.

“Listen,” Dahlia said, “I’ve got a warlock coming tomorrow. My parents thought they could get the money into my bank by then. You’ll see. You talk to him about the cure. You have the money. You said so yourself.”

I closed my eyes and leaned back in my bed. What was the point in discussing this with her? Hope was a dangerous word as close to death as we were, and I knew it would eat her up. I thought about my bakery, of the different recipes I’d been perfecting. Like the vanilla-mousse cupcakes I’d developed right before I got sick. I whispered the recipe to myself, trying to push away what I really wanted to think about. After ten minutes of mumbling recipes and messing them all up, I rolled to my side and looked at Dahlia. I had to ask her one more question. Just out of curiosity, of course.