The early morning light bathed the Newman estate in a soft, golden glow, but inside its opulent walls, a suffocating dread had taken root. Cole Howard sat slumped in a leather chair, the color drained from his face, a sheen of sweat clinging to his brow. Across the room, Victoria Newman watched him with a heart pounding in dread. She had spent days silently observing the alarming changes—his weight loss, the sleepless nights, the dry, relentless cough that echoed through the halls like a ticking clock. What started as innocent concern had twisted into something far more insidious.
At first, Cole brushed it off—”just a cold,” he’d insisted. But the flu doesn’t make a man look like he’s fading away. The worry that had gnawed at Victoria’s soul turned to raw fear when she saw the first crimson flecks staining the tissue in his hand. And when he doubled over, coughing violently, blood speckling his palm, her composure shattered.
“You need to go to the hospital,” she said again, voice tight, arms crossed as she fought to keep herself together.
Cole tried to resist, always the stoic. “I’m fine,” he rasped, as though saying the words might make them true. “Just stress.”
But he wasn’t. And she knew it.
When she reached for his trembling, ice-cold hand, Victoria knew this was no ordinary illness. He agreed—barely—to let her drive him. But halfway to the car, he collapsed, his chest rattling like broken glass. She caught him before he hit the pavement, desperation fueling her strength. “Stay with me, Cole. Please.”
The ambulance came quickly, but time moved too slowly. As she gripped his hand in the back of that vehicle, whispering reassurances, her heart screamed in familiar agony. She had lived this kind of fear before—with Reed, with her father, even with Ashland. But this was Cole—her Cole. The one man who had once been her peace, her shelter in the storm. And now, he was fading in front of her, slipping through her fingers like sand.
At the hospital, chaos moved around her—nurses, machines, monitors. She stayed at his side until the ER team took over, ordering chest X-rays and running emergency bloodwork. Alone in the waiting room, arms wrapped tightly around herself, Victoria stared ahead, replaying every moment she had dismissed his symptoms. Every “I’m fine,” every night she hadn’t forced him to get help.
When the doctor finally emerged, she stood before him, braced for the blow. And it came.
“There’s a mass in his lung,” he said. “We don’t know yet if it’s malignant, but it’s causing bleeding in the airways. We’ll need to run a biopsy immediately.”
Victoria’s knees nearly buckled. She didn’t need to hear the word—cancer was already there, ringing in her ears. “Do what you have to do,” she managed to say. “Just save him.”
As the hours crawled by, family began to gather. Amy arrived first, then calls from Nick and Nate. But Victoria barely spoke. She sat outside Cole’s room, eyes fixed on him through the glass, watching the man who had once been her rock now rendered pale and fragile by a mysterious enemy growing inside him.
When Cole finally opened his eyes, he found Victoria sitting vigil, and a weak smile cracked his lips. “You stayed.”
“Of course I did,” she said softly, tears finally escaping. “I ignored the signs, but thank God I didn’t ignore you this time.”
“I’m scared,” he admitted, his voice a whisper.
“So am I,” she replied. “But if it’s cancer, then we fight.”
That word—fight—wasn’t just for him. It was for her. For them. Because she wasn’t only terrified of losing Cole. She was terrified of being left behind again. Of saying goodbye without getting to prepare. Of watching someone she loved dissolve into memory.
When the biopsy results came back, the room felt colder.
“It’s malignant,” the doctor confirmed. “Stage 3B, possibly progressing to stage 4. It’s in the lymph nodes. We’re doing a full scan to check for distant spread.”
Victoria felt her world stop.
Cole’s face was unreadable. “How long?” he asked.
“With treatment, we’ll fight it. But without it… less than a year.”
After the doctor left, silence pressed down on the room like a weight. Victoria dropped to her knees beside Cole’s bed, gripping his hand.
“You say that like we can win,” he said quietly.
“We can,” she insisted. “Maybe not forever. But we can win back time. Hope. Moments.”
He gave a bitter chuckle. “You’ve always been the fighter. I’ve always just endured.”
She reached up, gently touching his cheek. “That’s not endurance. That’s survival. And now, we fight together.”
Later that day, as he was wheeled away for imaging, Victoria stepped into the hallway, her hands shaking. The texts and calls kept coming—Nick, Nikki, Audra—but she couldn’t respond. How do you explain to people that the world has stopped spinning?
When Cole returned, his diagnosis already seemed to weigh on him like an invisible anchor. Victoria climbed into the hospital bed beside him and rested her head against his shoulder.
“We’re making a
list,” she said.
“A list?”
“Of everything we haven’t done. Places we haven’t seen. Words we haven’t said. And we’re going to do them—between treatments, between scans. This won’t be our whole story.”
And for a moment, they weren’t patient and caregiver. They were dreamers again, talking of lakes in Switzerland, museums in Amsterdam, and the quiet corners of Italy. There was a tenderness in the moment that didn’t erase the fear—but it helped them breathe through it.
That night, Cole asked, “What if the treatments don’t work?”
Victoria didn’t look away. “Then we live. We love. Until we can’t. But we don’t stop being alive.”
The next morning brought a new kind of storm.
The call came just after dawn, shattering Clare Grace Newman’s quiet world with brutal urgency. “It’s Cole,” her mother said, voice trembling. “It’s serious. I need you to come now.”
She ran—through the city, through the haze of her panic, following the unspoken map of instinct. And when she reached the hospital, when she saw the tubes and machines and the man who once told her bedtime stories now barely conscious under sterile light—her knees gave out.
“Daddy,” she whispered.
And in that room, surrounded by the scent of antiseptic and the sound of beeping monitors, the Newman family began to brace for a new war. One they hadn’t chosen. One they couldn’t afford to lose.
Because some battles aren’t just about survival—they’re about redemption, legacy, and love too deep to ever truly die.
