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GARY AND BETH DIDN’T TELL ANYONE ABOUT THE TUMOR IN THE DAYS that followed. They knew their friends would have questions—How serious is this? What happens next? Will Beth be fine?—and right now, they didn’t have any answers. It seemed better to wait until they heard back from Pathology, wait until they knew more about Beth’s condition, before telling their friends.

They hardly left the house at all as the time passed. Gary told Rod he wasn’t coming into the store for a few days, and he and Beth did whatever they could to distract themselves. Watched a few British crime shows on Netflix. Played Scrabble. Crossed items off their to-do list to prepare for the baby.

No matter what they did, it was impossible for Gary to focus. All he could think about was the worst-case scenario: What if this was something serious? What would his life be like if he lost Beth?

Eighteen years they’d been together. Nearly half his life. A mutual friend had introduced them during their senior year at the University of Michigan, and the connection was instant. They were inseparable for that final year of college, not falling in love so much as dive-bombing into it like two full-throttle kamikaze pilots. After graduation, Beth followed Gary when he found a job selling insurance in his hometown of River Falls, Michigan. Within a year, they were engaged. Within two, they were married.

They’d been through a lot in the nearly two decades since then. They’d helped each other through the deaths of both sets of parents. They’d dealt with a flooded house. They’d fantasized about moving somewhere exotic but had never gotten around to it. They’d made mistakes and come to understandings. They’d won. They’d lost. They’d binge-watched countless shows together. Seinfeld. Criminal Minds. Dexter. Mad Men.

Beth was the best person he knew. She made the good times better and the hard times easier—and there’d been plenty of both over the years. If he were to list the ten best moments of his life, every one of them involved Beth; if he were to list the ten worst moments of his life, Beth had been there to comfort him during each one. She was his soul mate, his best friend. Happily ever after had always seemed a foregone conclusion. A given.

THE CALL CAME AFTER THREE DAYS: THE PATHOLOGY RESULTS WERE IN. Gary and Beth returned to the hospital and waited in a room that looked nearly identical to the one they’d been in earlier. A few minutes in, there was a knock on the door and an older Asian doctor with wispy white hair entered. He introduced himself as Alan Narita, an oncologist. He sat down across from them and paused for a moment. Then, in a calm, even voice, he spent the next ten minutes explaining three things.

Brain cancer.

Stage IV.

Inoperable.

SITTING BEHIND THE COUNTER OF SOLID GOLD PAWN, OTTO STARED OUT the pawnshop’s front window at the dirty piles of half-melted snow accumulated in the parking lot’s cracked and uneven asphalt. He massaged his knee as he stared, working his fingers deep into the hardened tissue around the ligaments—cold weather, for some reason, always made his bad knee throb.

The pain had him in a shit mood. His mood worsened considerably when his phone rang and Carlos’s name popped up on the screen. He’d spent the past few days dreading this call.

“You talk to De La Fuente?” Otto answered, getting straight to the point.

“Yeah. I finally did.”

“And?”

“He’s pissed,” Carlos said. “He went apeshit when I told him.”

Otto clenched his jaw, ground his molars together.

“I’ll have the cash soon,” Otto said. “De La Fuente’s overreacting.”

“What else is new? He overreacts to everything.”

“So what’s the bottom line? How do I get out of this?”

“Bottom line is this: I’ll be back up in your area at the end of April. About six weeks from now. Have the cash then.”

“Might need more time than that.”

“Tough shit—you get six weeks,” Carlos said. “That’s two hundred thousand dollars. No IOUs. No excuses. Nothing but the cold, hard cash. If you don’t have it, you’re a dead man. That simple. De La Fuente don’t play when it comes to money.”

“I’ll have it,” Otto said. Better to agree now and figure it out later.

“One final thing,” Carlos said. “De La Fuente wants you to know just how serious this is. Wants you to know exactly how he deals with people who owe him money. I just sent you a video. Watch it on your phone. Then call me back.”

Otto ended the call and looked at his in-box. He had a message from Carlos—a hyperlink. Otto tapped the link and his phone’s video player opened. An image of a dark, dingy room appeared on-screen. A shirtless man was chained to a wall in the room, his face beaten to a bloody, bruised pulp. His arms were extended from his body, restraints pinning his limp hands to the cement wall behind him. Nothing happened for a few seconds; then a second man wearing a black ski mask walked into the picture.

He carried a chainsaw.

The tied-up man began wildly screaming and pulling against the restraints. Chainsaw man slowly walked across the room. When he was a few feet away from the tied-up man, he yanked the chainsaw’s pull cord and the motor fired up. He inched the whirring blade closer and closer to the tied-up man, who was hysterically crying.

Just as the chainsaw was about to rip into the side of the tied-up man’s neck, Otto exited out of the video. He called Carlos back.

“You see the video?” Carlos answered.

“I saw enough.”

“That poor bastard was a dealer from some shithole in Tennessee who owed De La Fuente just under sixty thousand dollars. If you don’t have the cash when I visit, the same thing will happen to you. De La Fuente will decapitate your ass with a chainsaw. Understand me, Otto?”

“Yeah. I understand.”

Carlos ended the call. Otto set down his phone. The call had brought on a headache that mirrored the dull pain in his knee.

He blew out a hard, frustrated sigh and closed his eyes. What a mess. What a complete fucking disaster. He’d been involved in the drug trade for more than twenty years, had operated Solid Gold Pawn as a front to launder his drug money for fifteen of those years, and he’d never been as royally fucked as he was now.

He couldn’t get that video out of his mind. He’d never even met Miguel De La Fuente, the ghostly figure who ran the El Este cartel from the bowels of Mexico, but he’d heard enough stories from Carlos and other drug runners to know how ruthless he was. But it was one thing to hear stories; getting a firsthand look at De La Fuente’s cold-bloodedness was entirely different. The video had left Otto rattled—and very few things in life rattled him.

The hell of it was, this problem with De La Fuente wasn’t even his biggest concern at the moment. There was something else—rather, someone else—he had to take care of first.

IT WAS LIGHTLY SNOWING WHEN GARY AND BETH EXITED THE HOSPITAL AN hour after speaking with Dr. Narita. Beth slipped on her peacoat but left the front of it hanging open—over the past month, the swell of her belly had become too pronounced for her to button the coat.

She hooked her arm into Gary’s for support as they trudged to their Corolla. Gary helped her into the car and brushed a thin layer of snow from the windshield with the sleeve of his jacket. He opened the driver’s-side door and collapsed into the front seat. They both stared blankly out the windshield at the storm clouds scudding across the sky like evil spirits.

Neither of them had reacted much while Dr. Narita gave them the news. They just sat there, expressions of disbelief frozen on their faces, as Dr. Narita explained that Beth’s tumor was classified as a glioblastoma, an extremely aggressive, hard-to-treat cancer. The tumor was too deep, too far developed, and in too sensitive of a location to perform surgery.

They asked about Beth’s outlook, and Dr. Narita gave them some statistics. Grim, but they appreciated the honesty. The average length of life for people diagnosed with glioblastomas was eight to twelve months. Eight without treatment. Twelve with. Only a few survived longer than that.

Staring out the windshield now, the memory of the meeting still fresh in his mind, Gary slowly shook his head. “I refuse to believe this,” he said. His voice didn’t sound like his own.

He reached across the armrest and placed his hand on Beth’s thigh. She turned to him and opened her mouth but didn’t even get a word out before she burst into tears. She covered her face with her hands and deep sobs racked her body. She let go of her posture and collapsed forward in her seat.

Gary draped his arm around her and she buried her face in his shoulder. The sobs kept coming, unstoppable. She cried the way someone might heave after food poisoning—explosively, violently. He felt the shoulder of his shirt dampen with her hot tears. Her deep, sloppy breathing and incoherent sobs were the only noises in the car.

In all their years of marriage, Gary had never seen Beth cry like this. He could barely even remember the last time he’d seen her cry. She’d cried on the day they’d found out she was pregnant, six months ago. But those tears were tears of happiness. She’d cried on the day he proposed to her almost two decades ago, but those tears, too, were tears of happiness, tears of joy. She’d cried five years ago, when both her parents passed away within a three-month span, but those tears weren’t like these. These tears were like a tsunami, a full-scale emotional breakdown the likes of which he’d never seen from his wife.

Face burrowed into Gary’s shoulder, Beth’s tears continued. She’d been brave as they’d listened to Dr. Narita, but the floodgates had now opened. Gary tried to hold back but it became too much. His eyes filled with tears and he started sobbing, too.

They stayed in the parking lot for a long time—no words, just tears.

Holding Beth in his arms, Gary looked at the slender willow stem of her neck, the tender curve of her skull. Inside that small, delicate cradle of bone was a mass of foreign cells that could end her life at any moment.

A time bomb that was ticking away.