March 15th 1968
David held her hand until the end.
He was only ten, but he didn't feel like a child as he sat beside her bed. He felt ancient. Worn down. He felt the weight of watching someone die—his little sister, little Ruth—slowly consumed by something the doctors called leukemia. He called it torture.
She was skin and bone now, gaunt like the skeletons in his schoolbooks. Red spots bloomed across her arms, her neck, her hollow cheeks—petechiae, the nurse had said, like that made it better to name them. Each breath rattled in her chest like stones in a tin can. The sound filled their tiny shared bedroom, impossible to escape. He'd tried sleeping in the main room last week, but he couldn't leave her alone. What if she woke up scared? What if she called for him and he wasn't there?
So he stayed. Always.
His mother knelt at the foot of the bed, clutching her crucifix in white-knuckled hands. Her lips moved silently, forming the same prayers she'd whispered for months. Our Father, who art in Heaven. Hail Mary, full of grace. Over and over, like words alone could fix this.
They couldn't.
When the doctors at the Royal Infirmary had finally admitted there was nothing more they could do—nothing the NHS could afford, anyway, not the experimental treatments happening in London or America—she'd gone quiet for a long time. Then she'd taken David's face in her rough, work-worn hands and said it must be God's plan. One of His great works. That Ruth would be with the angels soon, and wasn't that beautiful?
Cowardice. That's what it was. Hiding behind prayers instead of fighting. Instead of doing something.
He hated her for it. Not always—sometimes he still loved her, still wanted to crawl into her lap like he had when he was small. But right now, watching her pray while Ruth drowned in her own lungs, he hated her.
His father had died last year, crushed between steel rollers at the mill. Everyone said it was tragic. David thought the world was better for it. At least now his mother's wages didn't disappear down Thomas Price's throat in the form of cheap whiskey.
Ruth let out a wet, rattling cough. Blood flecked her cracked lips, bright red against her greyish skin. David grabbed the rag from the bedside table—already stiff with dried blood from yesterday, the day before—and wiped it away gently, carefully, before it could soak into her threadbare nightgown. The one with the faded yellow flowers. Her favorite, once. Now it hung on her like a burial shroud.
The sheets beneath her were already stained rusty brown. They'd stopped being able to afford fresh ones two months ago. His mother had scrubbed them raw trying to get the blood out, but it never really came clean.
They couldn't afford the experimental treatments, either. The ones that might have saved her. The doctors had mentioned them once, carefully, watching his mother's face. Chemotherapy, they called it. New. Promising. Expensive.
His mother worked three cleaning jobs now—up before dawn scrubbing other people's floors, home after dark with hands cracked and bleeding. She brought home maybe ten pounds a week if she was lucky, if none of her ladies decided they didn't need her that day. The rent alone took four pounds. Food, coal for heating, the gas meter—it all added up. There was never anything left over. Never enough.
David tried to help. He'd begged shopkeepers along Ecclesall Road for work, offered to run errands, sweep floors, stack shelves, anything. Mr. Peterson at the grocer's sometimes let him haul boxes for a shilling. Mrs. Chen at the laundry gave him sixpence to deliver clean sheets to her customers. On a good week, he might earn two shillings. More often, it was less. No one wanted to hire a ten-year-old boy made of skin and bones, no matter how hard he worked.
It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough.
Ruth's fingers twitched in his hand. He looked down at them—so thin now he could see every bone, every tendon, the skin stretched tight and translucent. She'd had plump little hands once, always sticky from stolen sweets or grubby from playing in the courtyard. She used to grab his sleeve and tug him along, chattering about nothing and everything. She'd been alive.
"David?" Her voice was barely a whisper, more breath than sound.
He leaned closer, squeezing her hand as gently as he could. Her bones felt like bird wings beneath his fingers. "I'm here, Ruthie. I'm right here."
Her eyes opened—just barely, just slits. They'd been bright brown once, quick and clever, always laughing at his jokes even when they weren't funny. Now they were dull, clouded with pain and the fever that never broke. "Tell me... tell me a story?"
His throat closed up. She always asked for stories. Fairy tales, mostly. Princesses and magic and happily ever afters. Beautiful lies that made her smile. But he couldn't deny her. Not now. Not ever.
"Once upon a time," he started, his voice rough and cracking, "there was a brave princess who—"
"No." Her fingers squeezed his, weak as a baby bird's grip. "A true one. Tell me... about when we went to the park. Remember?"
He remembered. Last summer, before she got really sick. Before the bruises started appearing, before the nosebleeds that wouldn't stop. Their mother had scraped together enough for the bus fare—tuppence each—and they'd gone to Endcliffe Park on a Sunday afternoon. Ruth had laughed herself breathless on the swings, begging him to push her higher, higher. She'd found a ladybug crawling on a dandelion and cupped it carefully in her palms, named it Henry, and cried when it flew away. She'd eaten a whole ice lolly without sharing even a lick and hadn't felt guilty about it at all.
She'd been so happy. So completely, carelessly alive.
"Yeah," he managed, blinking hard. "I remember. You made me push you on the swings until my arms hurt."
She smiled. Just a little. Just enough to crease the corners of her cracked lips. "You didn't... mind."
"No," he whispered. "I didn't mind."
Her eyes drifted closed again, her breathing shallow and labored. Each inhale sounded wet, rattling.
His mother's prayers grew louder behind them. More desperate. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee... The same words, over and over, like if she said them enough times they'd turn into something real. Something powerful.
David wanted to scream at her to shut up, that God clearly wasn't listening, had never been listening. What kind of God let an eight-year-old girl drown in her own blood? What kind of plan was this?
But Ruth's hand was still warm in his—barely, but still warm—and he didn't want her last moments to be filled with shouting. She deserved peace. She deserved something.
So he sat. He held her hand. He stroked her hair with his free hand, the way she liked.
And he watched his sister die.
o–o–o–o
She didn't last the week. She died three days later, on a grey Tuesday morning in March, while their mother was at work scrubbing someone else's floors. David had been reading to her from her favorite book of fairy tales when her breathing simply... stopped. One moment the rattling was there, the next it wasn't. The silence was worse than the sound had been.
She died in torturous pain. Drowning on dry land. Bleeding from the inside out. Eight years old.
His heart died with her.
The funeral was small. Cheap. The local church was kind enough to donate the plot—a tiny corner of the graveyard where the ground was rocky and nothing much grew. The headstone was simple grey granite, the letters carved shallow to save cost:
RUTH ELIZABETH PRICE
1960 - 1968
A Loving Daughter
A Loving Sister
Taken Far Too Soon
The priest had left hours ago, murmuring platitudes about God's mysterious ways and eternal rest. His mother had stayed only long enough to place a single wilted daffodil on the grave before leaving for her evening shift at Mrs. Henderson's. They couldn't afford for her to miss work. Not even for this.
But David couldn't move. He stood in front of the headstone, staring at his sister's name carved into cold stone, and he could barely breathe.
Eight years. That's all she got. Eight years of hand-me-down clothes and stolen sweets and a damp bedroom in a council flat. Eight years of being afraid of the dark and loving fairy tales and holding his hand when she was scared. Then pain. Then nothing.
His fists clenched at his sides, knuckles going white, nails biting into his palms hard enough to hurt. The pain felt good. Real. Something he could understand.
The emotions rolled through him like waves crashing against cliffs—one after another, relentless, drowning him. Grief so heavy he thought it might crush his chest. Sadness that made his eyes burn and his throat close. And underneath it all, threading through everything else like a red-hot wire: fury.
Rage at his mother for praying instead of fighting. At his father for drinking himself to death and leaving them with nothing. At the doctors who'd shaken their heads and said there's nothing more we can do when they meant there's nothing more we can do for free. At the NHS for having limits. At the chemotherapy researchers in their London laboratories, working on treatments that might have saved her if only they'd worked faster, if only they'd cost less.
At everyone who had more than them and did nothing. At everyone who could have helped and didn't.
At a world that let children die because their mothers couldn't afford to save them.
He stared at the headstone until the letters blurred, swimming in and out of focus. Taken far too soon. Such meaningless words. As if she'd been borrowed and then returned on schedule. As if this was natural. Acceptable. Just one of those things that happened to poor families in council flats.
It wasn't.
It wasn't.
There had to be a way to fix this. To save people like Ruth. To make it so no one else had to stand in a cheap grave corner with rocky soil and dead grass and stare at their sister's name carved in stone because that's all they could afford to give her.
There has to be, he thought desperately, fiercely, his nails digging crescents into his palms. Someone, somewhere, has to know how. Has to be able to help.
The wind picked up, cold and bitter, cutting through his thin jacket like knives. March in Sheffield. Still winter, really, no matter what the calendar said. The kind of cold that got into your bones and stayed there. The kind of cold that killed people who couldn't afford proper heating.
The kind of cold that didn't care.
David didn't move. Couldn't move. His legs felt rooted to the ground, his feet frozen in the dead grass. He just stood there with his white-knuckled fists and his burning eyes and his shattered heart, staring at those carved letters until they stopped meaning anything at all.
And he made a promise.
To the cold ground and the grey sky and his sister's name in stone. To Ruth herself, wherever she was—if she was anywhere at all, which he doubted, because if there was a God who cared she wouldn't be here.
I'll find a way. Whatever it takes. I'll find it.
He didn't know what he meant yet. Didn't have the words for it, didn't have a plan or a path or anything but raw, bleeding need. He was ten years old and he'd just buried his sister and the world felt like broken glass under his skin, cutting him with every breath.
But the promise sat in his chest like an ember, hot and bright and refusing to go out no matter how cold the wind blew.
I'll make sure this never happens again.
The words built in his throat. Pressure mounting. The fury and grief and helplessness had nowhere to go, no outlet, no release. It filled him up until he thought he might burst apart from it.
So he screamed.
Raw and wordless and torn from somewhere deep in his chest where the ember burned. He screamed at the grey sky and the cold ground and the cheap headstone and the world that had taken his sister and given him nothing but a grave to stand beside.
He screamed until his throat was raw, until his voice cracked and broke, until there was nothing left inside him but the echo of it.
The cemetery didn't answer. The world didn't change. Ruth stayed dead.
But the promise remained, burning in his chest like a star.
Whatever it takes.
I'll find it.
O–o–o–o