On the phone, Victoria explained that Marc suddenly began clutching his abdomen in excruciating pain last night, forcing them to rush him to the hospital. The test results came back with a devastating diagnosis: late-stage liver cancer, and they issued a death notice.
Some diseases come on so aggressively that from diagnosis to death, it takes no more than a month. What's worse is that Marc had endured it until he could no longer bear it, and it was only then that someone noticed.
After hanging up with Victoria, he glanced at the small woman curled up on the bench, her face pale with tears silently streaming down her cheeks. She clearly hadn't come to terms with the shocking news, or perhaps she didn't want to—refusing to accept the reality.
