“Sixty-nine.”

“What?”

“You had sexual stuff on your bucket list.”

She laughed and I thought I saw a little color creep into her cheeks. “You aren’t bullshitting me, are you? Like weird stuff?”

“Not weird. Just…unusual. You aren’t missing anything with the sixty-nine thing. It’s not as fun as it sounds…”

She tilted her head at me, suddenly very interested. “Oh?”

“Yeah…it’s…well, there’s just too much to multitask.”

She frowned at me. “You’re a computer programmer and you are complaining about multitasking?”

I shrugged. “It’s kind of hard on the neck, too.”

Now her eyes widened. “And how do you know all this?”

Oh, shit. Well, this was awkward. “Uh…” I looked away.

She laughed again. “It’s okay. I’m just teasing. Though someday I’ll kick the crap out of all those other chicks you did it with. Or at least in my mind, I will.”

I smiled, heartened by her talk. She’d had no idea about planning to die or wanting to make a bucket list or any of that, and I was relieved.

The doctor didn’t arrive until almost noon and I was dragging ass, but all our friends had shown up by then and I could sit back and let her chat with them while I concentrated hard on staying conscious.

Liam arrived with a big bouquet of flowers. He’d managed to step foot in a hospital more times in the past few weeks than he had in his entire life before. I was proud of him and impressed that his affection for Emilia had dragged him here.

“Thanks, William. They are beautiful. But the doctor is going to come in here and tell me I can go home. So I’ll have Adam take them home and put them in a big vase for me, okay?

Apparently she didn’t have the heart to tell Liam that she was restricted from having flowers or plants near her during her chemo treatment. Liam hardly seemed to be paying attention. He appeared transfixed by one of Emilia’s friends, again. The quiet, studious Jenna. I’d thought that infatuation had passed but he was eyeing her again in a pretty obvious way and she was pretending not to notice.

I grabbed the flowers and tucked them outside the door in the hallway on a tray.

Alex and Jenna had pulled out some dice game and they were showing Emilia and Kat how to play it. Heath came right before the doctor did, and he evicted us all from the room while he examined her.

Once he’d finished, I was allowed back inside while he made notes to her chart on his tablet. “She was down to her last three rounds when this happened, and her white blood count is far lower than I would like. So we are going to discontinue the chemotherapy.”

Emilia threw a weak fist pump in the air. “Yesss!”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Is that safe? I mean…if you originally determined twelve rounds and she’s only had nine—”

“We were erring on the side of caution, Mr. Drake, given her circumstances. Her counts are down. She needs to rebuild her immunity. At this point, chemotherapy is no longer effective.”

“Yeah, you heard him,” Emilia said.

I ignored her. “I’m just—well as you say, being cautious is best. But will the chemotherapy be as effective in the long run if it’s been cut short?”

“We originally increased the dosage on her treatment plan for several reasons. Her age, first and foremost. And given the… the circumstances when she began the chemo…”

The doctor was rather delicately referring to the now-terminated pregnancy. I threw a glance at Emilia, who was resting against her pillow and watching the doctor, but her expression had not changed.

“I’m discharging her into your care today, but I’ll be sending a nurse by every day to run a blood test on her. She needs rest and fluids.”

He signed off on the chart and I felt, suddenly, that I wanted to argue with him. I wanted her to have those additional rounds of chemo. “What if you administered the old drug she was on for the additional rounds? So you could keep going—”

“Hell, no,” Emilia muttered.

The doctor had a long-suffering look on his face. “With her white blood count at the levels they are, she isn’t going to be getting any chemo for a while. This last round wiped her out and while it is an effective drug, the reaction she had to it could have seriously damaged her health. She needs to spend these next few weeks resting. But she’s done with chemotherapy unless something is found in the full body scan that indicates she should continue.”