Chapter 90

The subject? Her dad’s illness, of course. The relatively minor injuries done to his body by his captors were nothing compared to the kind of damage such a disease could inflict on him. Ken read about M.S. on her phone. The signs, symptoms, and treatments. No cure, but it was manageable. Still, the weakened state she’d noticed time and again, the shaking, the recurring susceptibility to colds and either minor sicknesses—he would always have that. Was he really healthy enough to go on missions? Where he had to rely on his hands and his mind and his strength?

Its consequences hadn’t registered at first, because she simply didn’t know that much about the disorder. But now that she had the facts, laid out in front of her, each one hit Ken like an arrow piercing her flesh. It took everything she had not to break down crying in the middle of the office, where a woman twice her size and three young children chattered loudly nearby, as though nothing was wrong with the world.