Read Online Once Upon a Wish by Rachelle Sparks - Free Book Online

office, so I’m sorry to have to tell you this over the phone, Sharon,” he said. “I’d be there with you if I could.”
    She knew this was serious. Dr. Soud had never diagnosed Katelyn with anything more than a cold, had never treated her with a single antibiotic until the week before when he thought her symptoms indicated a bladder or kidney infection. She had always been the picture of health.
    “Katelyn has cancer,” he said.
    Sharon needed answers.
    Immediately.
    She could remain calm in every storm as long as she knew exactly what was going on—as long as there was a plan. Dr. Soud’s brief hesitation silently told Sharon she’d better pay attention.
    He’s fixin’ to tell me something I need to hear
, Sharon thought.
    “We aren’t sure what kind of cancer we’re dealing with yet,” Dr. Soud continued. “We need to admit her to Wolfson Children’s Hospital for blood draws and scans to see how her organs are doing.”
    That was the plan. There was a next step.
    Clarity.
    Direction.
    Any tears that might have threatened to fall in the midst of the word
cancer
hid behind the walls of Sharon’s strength, her confidence as a mother who knew that God would prepare her for His will, no matter what it was. To the center of her being, the core of everything she believed, she knew that if His will was to take Katelyn from them, she would know.
    And she did.
    Katelyn isn’t going anywhere
, Sharon thought.
    They got her admitted, and later that evening, Dr. Soud made a visit to his little patient, a girl he had known and taken care of for the past twelve years. He sat down beside her on her hospital bed and explained.
    “I’m not sure what you have, but I’m confident we’ll be able to figure it out and we’ll get you well,” he said gently. “We’ll be running some tests, and right now we’re just trying to figure everything out, so you have to be patient with us, okay?”
    Katelyn smiled with half her heart. The other half pounded with fear. She knew that the mass they had found on her spine appeared cancerous, and, like in the minds of most twelve-year-olds, cancer meant death.
    The night Ray arrived at the hospital after chasing down Crystal’s bus, Katelyn was still awake. She had waited for him, just as she had done from the time she was a little girl. It was a rule in their house that Ray was always the last to tuck her in, and thosemoments before bedtime were meant for snuggling and talking about everything and nothing. He knew she would be awake, waiting, ready to talk.
    Before he opened the door to her room, Sharon’s words echoed in his mind as if they were his own.
    You can’t be crying,
she had said
. You will scare her to death.
    So he wiped his tears once again and walked into Katelyn’s room, where she lay beneath a tree of IVs dripping relief into her veins to keep the pain in her back at bay. As he approached her bed, his mother’s voice joined his wife’s.
    Pull up your bootstraps, and pull ‘em up tight.
    It was the advice his mother had always given in hard times.
    It was time to be strong.
    “I knew you’d be up,” Ray said nonchalantly with a smile before sitting down beside Katelyn and taking her hand. She looked every bit as healthy as she had a few days before, when he had tucked her into her own bed at home.
    “Don’t worry about this,” he said to his daughter, hoping to give her the confidence he knew she and Crystal had always depended on. “Whatever we’re dealing with, everything will be fine.”
    Katelyn nodded gently. He kissed her goodnight and stepped into the hallway, where he found Sharon and wrapped her in his arms.
    “We’re gonna get through this together,” he whispered in her ear.
    They had witnessed the ending of a marriage between two of their closest friends after the loss of their daughter, and that was not going to happen to them.
    “We are going to do this together, talk about it together, feel it together,” Sharon said, her head