Perfect Timing Read Free

of home. We can’t just let her—” Quincy couldn’t finish the sentence. “There are all kinds of treatments. Somebody, somewhere, can do something! A really good team of doctors can put her into remission. I know it.”
    “She already has a really good team of doctors, some of the best.” For several seconds, Clint rasped for breath. The sound reminded Quincy of the story he’d once read to his little sister, Sam, about a tiny train that huffed and puffed to get up a steep grade. “It’s not their fault she has some weird subtype they’ve never seen! And it’s . . . too . . . late to take her somewhere else. She . . . could . . . die during a long flight. This is my . . . fault, Quincy, all mine. I screwed around, thinking she had a bad case of flu. Jesus, help me. I . . . should . . . have realized! If I’d gotten her up here sooner, they might have been . . . able . . . to . . . save her. Now all they can do is give her transfusions . . . and . . . IV fluids. That helps, but it’s a short-term fix, and now she’s getting so dehydrated, they have to poke her and poke her to . . . even . . . find . . . a vein.”
    Quincy hauled in a ragged breath and squeezed his eyes shut. Focus, he ordered himself. His brother needed him to say all the right things, and his mind had gone as blank as a crashed computer screen. “Clint, no matter what happens, this isn’t your fault. You took her in to see competent doctors here. They just didn’t realize what they were dealing with at first, and we lost precious time. If you’re sure she’s in the best hands available, then we just have to trust in the team up there and pray like crazy that she takes a sudden turn for the good.”
    “I’m fresh out of prayers.” Clint sniffed, and Quincy heard a muffled sound like cloth brushing the cell phone. He could almost see his brother wiping his nose with his shirtsleeve. “The worst part is that she’s begging to go home.”
    To die, was Quincy’s first thought.
    Clint blew that theory all to hell by saying, “She’s convinced she isn’t dying. She says she had a vision and saw our third child, a little boy we’ll name Francis Wayne after Dad. I can tell she believes it, clear to the bottom of her heart. She thinks she’s going to get well and have another child.” A brief moment of quiet came over the air. Then Clint added, “You know how, when I first met Loni, I discounted her visions as a bunch of hocus-pocus crap, but she made a believer out of me. I’ve never doubted her visions since—until now.”
    Quincy felt tears trickling down his cheeks and turning to ice where they gathered at the corners of his mouth. “What she sees in her visions is never wrong. Hell, even the FBI acts as if everything she tells them comes straight from the Holy Grail.”
    “Exactly,” Clint said, his voice pitched barely above a whisper, “and now I’m doubting what she tells me. Five specialists out in the hall, telling me she’s dying. Her looking like a corpse already and spinning dreams I know can’t happen—” He broke off. “She’s dying, Quincy. I see the signs. No matter what she saw in her vision, I’m going . . . to . . . lose her. And God help me, I don’t know how I’ll survive it.”
    Quincy tried to gather his wits. This was new ground for him. As the oldest, Clint had always been the one who held everything together, the one who spoke while everyone else listened. Quincy knew Loni’s divinations hadn’t been wrong yet, but there could always be a first time. Loni had never been able to see her own future, only those of others. Wasn’t it possible that she had indeed seen a third child, named after their father, Frank, but the little boy wouldn’t be born to Loni? Maybe in the future, Clint would start over with a second wife, and she would be the one to present him with another son.
    The very thought of Clint with some other woman made Quincy want