Nick of Time Read Online Free

gulag than the runway. A death sentence.
    Jenny had picked up on Nicki’s binge-and-purge cycle four years ago and saved her life by whisking her off to a shrink. Carter had never had much tolerance for psychology or its practitioners—he’d always seen it as equal parts voodoo and bullshit—but God bless him, the doctor’s counseling had turned her around. To Nicki’s horror, she’d even put on a few pounds.
    Then came Jenny’s Cancer. The Big C. Within a month, between the chemo and the radiation, there was barely enough life left in Jenny to power a smile. A few weeks later, she was dead.
    Suddenly, with the speed of half a finger-snap, Carter and Nicki were all alone together. Father-stranger, meet daughter-stranger. It was like trying to turn on a light when no one had connected the wires. All they shared between them was the desperate need for Jenny to somehow reenter their lives.
    Carter took the bridge at Wilson’s Creek way too fast. If there’d been a car coming the other way, there’d have been no survivors. As it was, he was only a mile from the house and accelerating even faster.
    Nicki’s relapse, it turned out, had been inevitable. In Nicki’s mind, the doctor explained, recovery had been all about pleasing her mother. In the tangled non-logic that defined so much of psychology, Jenny’s death had relieved Nicki’s obligations to the get-well contract. “Surely you must have seen the warning signs,” the doctor had observed. “Some kind of abnormal behavior.”
    Right. Nicki’s behavior hadn’t resembled normalcy since she was twelve. Besides, Carter would have been looking for all the wrong signs.
    This time, instead of bingeing and purging, Nicki turned to diet drugs obtained from friends. Carter knew nothing about them, of course, but if he had, he might actually have approved. They’d have seemed like a good compromise: Nicki would eat something and keep it down for the whole day, even as the drugs reduced the size of her appetite. The diet drug was two drugs, actually, and taken together, according to the popular media—hell, according to the evening news—the results were truly amazing. People shed unwanted pounds, seemingly without side effects. Why wouldn’t that have been a good thing to try? If it would have improved her consistently sour attitude, he’d have tried anything.
    But there were side effects. Deadly ones. Primary pulmonary hypertension, PPH for short, thickened the tiny vessels in the lungs. This thickening, or “hardening,” in turn caused the pressure in those vessels to increase, causing blood to back up in the rest of the body as the cells awaited their turn to pass through the narrowed passages. The biological chain reaction that resulted took a half hour for the doctor to explain, but the time would come when Nicki’s lungs would no longer be able to sustain life.
    The average life expectancy from diagnosis to death was eighteen months. The average waiting time for transplants was twenty-four to thirty months. Do the math.
    At first, Carter had refused to believe it. Doctors were a dime a dozen, for heaven’s sake. He’d figured he could keep shopping till he found a physician who told him what he wanted to hear.
    But the decision was unanimous: a bilateral heart-lung transplant was her only hope for long-term recovery. In the end, Carter decided on a multipronged approach. He’d wear the damn pager for the transplants, but he’d also keep pressure on the doctors to try something new.
    No matter what the literature said, come hell or high water, he was not going to let Nicki die.
    God forbid that Nicki might make it easier. She was so pissed off that her regularly scheduled teen years had been interrupted by illness that she’d turned downright recalcitrant. She just wanted it all to end, she’d said. Life wasn’t worth living if it