Read Chapter 6: — FOR LIFE’S SAKE

Chenxi returned to Nuclear Medicine carrying a thick envelope of medical records.

Her face was pale enough that Li stopped typing before she said anything.

“It’s my father.”

“Old Zhao?”

“He had a physical. They think he has cancer.”

Li opened the envelope.

PSA elevation. Suspicious imaging. Nothing definitive yet.

“Possible,” he said. “Not certain. Don’t organise his funeral before pathology does.”

She stared at him.

“That was supposed to comfort me?”

“It was supposed to be accurate.”

He recommended more targeted imaging. Three days later, Chenxi practically dragged her father into the department.

Zhao Zhigang complained all the way to the scanner.

“I have work.”

“You also have a prostate.”

“I’ve had it for fifty-three years. It has never filed a complaint.”

“Today it has.”

The images were not reassuring. A suspicious focus appeared in the prostate, and further staging raised concern that the disease might already have spread.

A biopsy was arranged.

Old Zhao left before he had properly rested because a major case broke across the city.

The pathology came later.

Cancer.

Chenxi sat in an empty corridor holding the report until the paper bent between her fingers.

Li found her there.

“I already lost my mother,” she said. “I’m not ready to lose him.”

“No one is.”

“What do I do?”

“First, get him to treat his own life like a serious case.”

“With my father? That may be the hardest treatment in the hospital.”

The diagnosis changed their relationship overnight.

Chenxi called him at meal times. He ignored her. She entered follow-up appointments into his calendar. He deleted the reminders. She threatened to confiscate his cigarettes. He told her a seizure of property required legal authority.

Their arguments were loud because fear had no other language.

Li became their unwilling interpreter.

“He hears ‘treatment’ and thinks ‘loss of control,’” Li told Chenxi.

“He hears anything I say and thinks ‘optional.’”

“Also true.”

For Zhao, the hardest part was not the word cancer. It was becoming a patient.

For three decades, other people had called him when something went wrong. He had entered crime scenes, hospital corridors and family homes as the person who was supposed to make chaos smaller.

Now his own body had become the scene he could not secure.

One evening he asked Li, “How bad?”

Li avoided the easy lies.

“Bad enough that you need to stop pretending it belongs to someone else.”

Zhao smiled.

“You really are terrible at bedside manners.”

“You’re not at the bedside.”

“Technicality.”

Then he coughed for so long that neither man laughed.