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Allye blinked. She’d wanted to believe it wasn’t MS, but she hadn’t allowed herself to hope too much. She studied the doctor’s face. She wasn’t smiling. “What’s wrong? This is a good thing, right?”

“Of course. But you still have unexplained symptoms—serious symptoms. With the MRI, we also checked for tumors.”

Allye caught her breath.

“We didn’t find any,” the doctor hurried to assure her. “But sometimes, they aren’t easy to spot.”

Allye took a moment to digest that. The possibility of a tumor hadn’t occurred to her. Was that any worse than MS? Maybe. At least she might have some chance against a tumor.

“So what’s next?”

The doctor slipped off her glasses. “Although these results indicate it is very unlikely you have MS, I think it would still be wise to do a spinal tap to further rule it out. But in the meantime, we’ll run other tests as well.”

Great. “Looking for what exactly?”

“I won’t lie to you. There are many things that could be causing your symptoms. With your family history, we focused on that when normally we would have eliminated some of the other possibilities first. Now we’ll be backtracking.” She tapped on her keyboard. “I’ve put in the referral order for the spinal tap. When you leave, we’ll give you the phone number to schedule that. I also want to go ahead and do more blood work.”

“If the spinal tap doesn’t show anything, what other kinds of things will we be testing for? I’d like to know what I could be up against.”

The doctor sighed. “We’ll be checking for Lyme disease regardless because it can also cause the spinal tap to come back with a positive result. If the test is negative, we’ll still do further tests for Lyme, but with this other blood work, we’ll also look into the possibility of certain vitamin and mineral deficiencies, as well as test for a handful of autoimmune and other inflammatory conditions.”

Allye struggled to focus. She’d never dreamed there were so many other things that could be causing her symptoms. Of course, she’d simply assumed the diagnosis would be MS.

When the doctor asked if she had any other questions, she shook her head. Later, she would likely have a whole list of them, but she needed to let everything sink in first. For now, she had enough info to go on—hopefully, she’d remember the important things or be able to find them in her doctor’s notes online.

Once she was back in her car, she rested her head on the steering wheel. She needed a few minutes to think and pray before beginning the long drive home. Without lifting her head, she murmured, “Well, God, it looks like this isn’t finished yet. I still don’t know what the future holds or what’s going on, but I’m grateful it probably isn’t MS. Thank you for that.”

She knew—more from the doctor’s tone than her words—that there could still be something just as bad or worse going on, but she couldn’t deny her relief. A bit of her burden had lifted.

This deserved a celebration. And she knew exactly what she’d like to do. She started her car and backed out of her parking space. First order of business would be getting back to Kincaid before rush-hour traffic hit.

26

Eric followed several uniformed officersfrom Chief McHenry’s office and forced himself not to let the door slam behind him. An hour absolutely wasted. Because of one officer’s carelessness during a routine callout, they’d all had to sit through an hour-long lecture about procedure. He suspected the chief had included him as a reference rather than a target of the training, but he’d still lost an hour of valuable time.

He’d barely reached his desk when his phone vibrated. He quickly answered, not bothering to check the caller ID.

“Thornton.”

Allye’s voice came over the line. “Hey, Eric. Are you busy?”

“Yes.” Was he ever not?

“Oh.” Her disappointment was clear.

He didn’t need to take out his frustration on her. Trying to soften his tone, he asked, “What do you need?”

“I was hoping you might have time to join me for a photo shoot at Kincaid Lake. I promised I’d try not to go off alone, but no one else is available, and I’m anticipating a fantastic sunset that could be a great last-minute addition to my booth.” She paused the rush of words before adding, “But if you’re busy...”

“You’re going out there either way, aren’t you?” He felt the beginning of a tension headache coming on.

“Maaaybe.”

He rubbed his forehead, his eyes trailing over the notes that still needed to be entered into the system. But after his realization this morning, he wasn’t sure doing so was a good idea. If the mayor was getting info from his uncle, Eric didn’t want to make it available any sooner than he had to. And Allye did not need to be out in the park alone.

He sighed. “You at home now?”

“Yes.”