snatching your plate away. Most people get testy if I do that before they finish eating.”
“Something of a neatnik, are you?”
“It’s one of my more annoying flaws. I’d better see what’s keeping Zach.”
“He’s okay. We haven’t heard any loud crashes.” Duncan took a sip of coffee. “I was fifteen when my folks were killed. Ben was twenty-one. He dropped out of college, talked the construction company where he’d been working in the summers to take him on full-time and persuaded the court he was a fit guardian for the lot of us.” Duncan put down his mug. “You didn’t ask, but I thought you ought to know. He comes by his managing ways honestly.”
She tipped her head to one side. “I always wanted a brother or sister—someone who could do for me what you just did for Ben. Someone with all that shared history. I never intended for Zach to be an only child, too.”
“Does he have to be?”
“I don’t know.” She had a look on her face that made him think she wanted to clean something, and quick. Her glance fell on his mug, which was half-empty. She grabbed it and carried it to the coffeepot, which put her back to him. “I’m not sure what you know. What has Ben told you about my health?”
Ah. Easier to talk about some things when you weren’t eye to eye. “He said you were diagnosed with breast cancer a year and a half ago. The lump was small and they think they got it all. You had radiation before the surgery, and you’re on some kind of hormonal treatment.”
“Tamoxifen. I’ll take it for another three years. It suppresses estrogen production. They think high estrogen levels are linked to the type of cancer I had.”
Duncan’s grasp of female biology tended to be more hands-on than scientific, but he thought he saw where she was headed. “Would pregnancy affect your hormone levels?”
“Yes. They don’t know how much of a danger that is, though.” She turned around, his mug steaming gently in one hand. “You have no idea what a relief it is to talk to someone who can say ‘cancer’ right out loud without stammering.”
“Ben’s not usually one to tiptoe around a subject.”
“A lot of people are uncomfortable talking about it, though. My mother avoids the word as if it referred to a social disease.” The quick flash of her grin suggested this was a harmless oddity, nothing that troubled her.
“She’s afraid for you.”
“Yes. Yes, she is. And now I really need to check on Zach. If you think the only kinds of trouble he can get into are noisy—well, obviously it’s been a while since you were four.”
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