Harper's chest tightened. The room suddenly felt smaller, the filtered sunlight less comforting and more like a cage.

"How long?" Harper asked.

"The surgery itself is minimally invasive, but recovery is typically six to eight weeks before you can resume normal activities. Given your immune compromise, we'd recommend extending that to twelve weeks minimum. Complete isolation—home only, no visitors except for essential care."

Twelve weeks. Three months. The entire cruise season would be gone.

"There has to be another option," Harper said, hearing the edge in their own voice. "Medication? Physical therapy? Something that doesn't require—"

"I understand this is difficult," Dr. Patel interrupted gently. "But the metabolic cascade we're seeing suggests rapid progression. The bariatric intervention significantly slows that progression and gives us time to stabilize your immune response with pharmaceutical management. Without it, you're looking at organ involvement within eighteen months. Possibly sooner."

Harper stood up abruptly, then sat back down. The room tilted slightly.

"When would this happen?" they asked quietly.

"I'd recommend surgery within two weeks. The sooner we intervene, the better your prognosis. I'm going to refer you to our surgical team, and they'll contact you tomorrow to schedule the procedure."

Two weeks. Harper did the math automatically, the way electricians always did—calculating timelines, dependencies, what could and couldn't be moved. Two weeks meant losing the Celestial Dawn contract. That was forty thousand dollars. Two weeks meant abandoning the retrofitting project on the Caribbean Queen. That was another thirty.

"I need to think about this," Harper said.

"Of course. But don't think too long. Your body is already showing signs of stress. The longer we wait, the more complicated this becomes."

Harper left the office in a daze, walking past the waiting room with its antiseptic smell and its sunlight cages, past the reception desk where the nurse smiled sympathetically—she already knew, Harper realized, they all already knew—and out into the parking lot where the afternoon heat pressed down like a physical force.

In the car, Harper sat with both hands on the steering wheel, staring at nothing. The phone buzzed in their pocket. A text from Marcus, their oldest friend and occasional work partner: "How'd it go?"

Harper didn't answer. They couldn't. Not yet. Not until they figured out how to say the words that would change everything.