Chapter 3 - The Shadow in BostonWe moved to Boston together when we were twenty-one. Evan studied structural engineering on a full scholarship at Northeastern, while I worked at a boutique floral design shop on Newbury Street.
We lived in a tiny third-floor apartment that smelled of roasted coffee beans and damp radiator heat. We didn't have money for real furniture, so we used stacked wooden crates as a dining table and slept on a mattress on the floor beneath a framed poster of the Blue Harbor coastline.
Those three years in Boston were filled with relentless work and quiet, intoxicating joy.
Evan worked late into the night, designing sustainable housing systems for rural coastal communities. Every night at eleven o'clock, no matter how exhausted he was, he would walk to the flower shop to walk me home through the brick alleys of the Back Bay.
Then, during the winter of our twenty-fourth year, Evan developed a persistent, dry cough that wouldn't go away.
At first, he blamed it on the freezing wind blowing off the Charles River. But by February, he was struggling to climb the three flights of stairs to our apartment without stopping to catch his breath.
When we finally went to the Massachusetts General Hospital, the doctors performed an echocardiogram.
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The diagnosis came down like a hammer: Idiopathic Dilated Cardiomyopathy.
His heart muscle was enlarged, weakened, and failing at a terrifying speed.
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