Chapter 17
Carlos
We have a few hours before our presentation, so I spent the time walking around the city with my new camera, trying to be spontaneous like Jade would be. It’s tiring, but when I return to the hotel, I have three pictures, judiciously taken, to commemorate my trip.
I’m reviewing my translation notes for the third time when Jade arrives backstage at our Paris presentation.
This one is our biggest, and I expect she’s going to be even more nervous.
She’s fifteen minutes early, which is unusual for her.
She’s also pale, her hands gripping the handle of her laptop bag so tightly her knuckles have gone white. So that’s familiar.
“Buenos días,” I offer.
She nods but doesn’t speak, just moves past me to set up her laptop at the podium.
I watch her for a moment, trying to gauge her state of mind.
After Zurich, I learned to read the signs—the way she holds herself too rigidly when she’s nervous, the forced brightness in her smile when she’s trying to hide anxiety.
But today feels different. There’s a determination in the set of her shoulders that wasn’t there before.
She reaches into her bag and produces a Polaroid—from a quick glimpse I identify her and three other women, the same ones that came to Vienna. She props it against the base of the podium, adjusting it until it faces her directly. A talisman. Small and specific and entirely hers.
I look away before she catches me watching.
I return to my notes. The updated slides she sent me last night were vague on the opening section.
“Personal story—approx 2 minutes” was all the annotation said.
When I’d asked for specifics so I could prepare proper translations, she’d simply replied that she wanted it to feel natural, unrehearsed.
It’s annoying, professionally speaking. I prefer to have every word mapped out before a presentation begins.
Translating on the fly leaves room for error, for missing nuance.
But Jade had been insistent, and after the disaster of the previous presentations, I wasn’t about to push back on something that might actually work for her.
The audience is filing in now, especially in the back. There’s also a representative from the patient advocacy network co-hosting today’s event—more attendees than usual, more survivors in the room.
They’re why we do this work. Not for the reps or the research grants or the speaking fees, but for them.
Movement draws my attention back to Jade—she’s throwing her arms around a woman, one of the ones from the photo.
Tessa, I think. The hug lasts a long time, and I can see Jade’s lips moving as the two of them have a quiet conversation.
When Jade finally lets go, she hugs the man beside her friend too, and then they separate, the couple taking seats by the front, and Jade climbing the stage.
Jade is doing a final check of her slides. I can see her shoulders rising and falling with deep breaths.
“Ready?” I ask.
She turns to look at me, and there’s something in her expression I can’t quite read. Fear, yes. But also resolve. “Ready,” she says.
We take our positions. Jade at the podium, me at the translator’s station slightly to the side and behind her. From here I can see both her and the screen, and can watch her delivery while monitoring the slides to stay ahead of her pacing.
The coordinator gives the signal. Jade steps up to the microphone.
“Bonjour,” she begins, her voice only slightly shaky. “Thank you all for being here today.”
I translate into French, the words automatic, my attention divided between her and the audience response.
“I want to start today,” Jade continues, “by showing you something.”
She clicks the remote.
The slide changes.
I freeze.
On the screen behind us, filling the massive display, is a photograph of a young girl.
Maybe six or seven years old. She’s sitting in a hospital bed, wearing a pink gown covered in cartoon characters.
She’s smiling at the camera, but it’s the kind of smile children give when adults tell them to. And she’s completely bald.
It takes me two seconds to recognize her.
The shape of her face. The set of her eyes. That smile that doesn’t quite reach her gaze.
Jade.
“This is me,” she says.
I hear the words in English, process them, and know I need to translate. My mouth forms the French but my brain is several steps behind, still staring at that photograph, still trying to reconcile the vibrant woman at the podium with the small bald girl in the hospital bed.
Jade has turned to look at me. I realize I’ve stopped translating. Her eyebrows are raised slightly, waiting, and there’s a vulnerability in her expression that makes something in my chest tighten.
I force myself back to professional mode. She’s still speaking.
“—and I was diagnosed with childhood leukemia when I was nine years old.”
The French flows from me automatically now but underneath the translation, my mind is racing. Childhood leukemia. Cancer. Treatment. That’s why she understands these patients in a way I never could.
“It’s quite traumatic,” Jade is saying, and I translate—traumatique—while watching her gesture to her long dark ponytail, “to lose all your hair at that age.”
The gesture is deliberate, drawing attention to her hair. To the fact that it grew back. That she survived.
She pauses, and I can see her gather herself for what comes next. “I know showing childhood hospital photos isn’t exactly standard pharmaceutical presentation protocol.”
The audience gives a small laugh—uncertain, but warming. I translate, and without thinking, add my own comment. “Mais c’est bien mieux que de commencer par un énoncé de mission.”
The laugh is bigger this time, more genuine. Jade glances at me, eyebrows raised in question. I lean toward her. “But it’s much better than starting with a mission statement.”
Her smile becomes real, reaching her eyes, and some of the tightness leaves her shoulders. She turns back to the audience. “He’s not wrong.”
And just like that, we’re in sync. She speaks, I translate. She pauses, I fill the space. The earlier fear in her eyes has receded, replaced by focus and determination.
But I’m also watching every word, every gesture, through a completely different lens now.
When she talks about the importance of helping children maintain their identity during treatment, I’m thinking about a nine-year-old girl learning she was sick. Learning that her body, which should have been safe, was fighting against itself.
When she clicks to the next slide showing the initial product mockups and says, “So let’s change that,” her voice is a little shaky but passionate, and I find myself translating not just her words but her conviction.
She moves into the technical portion of the presentation—the portion I’ve heard so many times, the portion that was competent but cold.
But now it’s different. Now every data point, every efficacy rate, every clinical trial result is grounded in that opening image.
This isn’t just science. This is personal.
I translate methodically while part of my brain catalogs what she’s doing right. It’s not perfect—she’s still nervous. But she opened up. She shared. She hooked the audience.
There’s an authenticity in her delivery that Mercedes, for all her polish, never quite achieved. When Jade says, “We know how important this is because we’ve lived it,” it’s not a royal we. It’s not a corporate we. It’s personal.
A pharmaceutical rep in the third row is taking notes frantically. A woman in a headscarf in the back is leaning forward, completely engaged. Even the journalists—who usually look bored until the Q&A—are paying attention.
Even though it’s not perfect, it’s better than Mercedes ever was.
The realization should probably bother me more than it does. Mercedes was a colleague, a friend. But watching Jade command this room, watching her transform data into hope, I can’t muster any loyalty to the old way of doing things.
We’re twenty minutes in when Jade shifts to the patient testimonial section. She shows a photo of a young boy, maybe ten, running his hands through his hair and grinning at the camera.
“That’s what this is about,” Jade says quietly. “Helping people hold on to their sense of self. Stay recognizable to themselves, even through treatment.”
I translate as I’m thinking about Jade at nine years old, sick and scared, trying to hold on to any piece of herself she could. Trying to be something other than “the sick girl.”
No wonder she wanted this position. No wonder she fought for it even when she clearly hated the public speaking component.
This isn’t about career advancement or travel opportunities or impressing Rebecca.
This is personal.
The presentation is winding down now. Jade clicking through the final slides with contact information, research partner acknowledgments, funding sources, patient advocacy events. All the standard closing material. But before we get there, she pauses on a slide that simply shows our company logo.
“I want to thank you all for your time today,” she says, and her voice has become softer, more intimate.
“For those of you who are patients, or who love someone who’s a patient—we see you.
We’re working for you. And we won’t stop until every person going through treatment has the support and dignity they deserve. ”
I translate it and something in my throat goes tight.
Because I’m looking out at the audience and seeing their faces, seeing the woman in the headscarf blinking back tears, seeing a man reach over to squeeze his wife’s hand, and I know that Jade has done something I’ve never quite managed in five years of giving these presentations.
She’s made them feel seen.
The presentation ends. Applause fills the room, and it’s not the polite appreciative applause of Vienna or the scattered response from Berlin. This is sustained, enthusiastic, genuine.
Jade steps back from the podium, and I can see her hands shaking slightly as she sets down the remote. But she’s smiling, and it’s not the fake smile from the photograph or the professional smile she wears in the office. It’s real.
People are standing now, moving toward the front for the Q&A session.
A pharmaceutical rep wants to know about clinical trial timelines.
A researcher asks about the mechanism of action.
Jade fields each question with confidence, and I translate as needed mechanically, my mind still processing what just happened.
She trusted me with this. With her story. She stood up there and made herself vulnerable in front of hundreds of strangers, knowing I would translate every word, knowing I would be the bridge between her truth and their understanding.
That’s not a small thing.
A journalist asks about future product development.
A patient asks about access and affordability.
Jade answers each one thoughtfully, and I notice she’s leaning slightly forward when patients speak, giving them her complete attention in a way that’s different from how she engages with the pharmaceutical reps.
The Q&A runs long—fifteen minutes past our scheduled end time. The room coordinator is making subtle “wrap it up” gestures from the back, but Jade keeps taking questions. She wants to talk to these people. She wants to hear their stories.
Finally, the coordinator has to actually step forward and announce that we need to vacate the room for the next event. Jade thanks everyone again, and people begin to file out, but several patients linger, approaching the stage.
Her friends linger too, and Jade excuses herself from a pharma rep and has a brief word with them before hugging them both goodbye.
I start packing up the translation equipment, giving Jade space.
But I’m watching her talk to a woman, the two of them clearly talking about the woman’s close-cropped hair, based on the way Jade keeps looking at it.
Jade’s face lights up. She reaches out and touches the woman’s arm, saying something that makes them both smile.
This is why she does this work. Not the science, not the research papers, not the career advancement.
This.
After another ten minutes, the room has finally emptied. The hotel staff is stacking chairs. Jade is packing up her laptop, moving slowly, like she’s exhausted.
I should say something. Acknowledge what just happened. Tell her she did well.
But everything I think to say feels inadequate. “Good presentation” doesn’t cover it. “You followed my advice” makes it about me when it clearly isn’t.
So I just stand there, holding my tablet, watching her coil up the laptop cord with shaking hands, and trying to figure out how to talk to someone I thought I understood but clearly didn’t understand at all.
She turns and catches me staring. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say quickly. Then, because I have to say something, “You did well. Very well.”
She nods, but doesn’t quite meet my eyes. “Thanks.”
There’s more I should say, more that I want to say. But the words won’t come, and after a moment she hefts her laptop bag over her shoulder and starts toward the exit.
I follow, my mind still turning over that photograph, that story, the realization that I’ve spent months working with Jade and never bothered to ask why this mattered so much to her.
I thought I was the professional one. The experienced one. The one who understood how important this work was.
But watching her tonight, I realize I’ve been doing this job for five years without ever really understanding who we’re doing it for.
Jade just taught me that.
And I think that is the thing about her.
It was never her laugh or the way she fills a room or the fact that she is objectively attractive.
It was this. The way she made me see something I’d looked at for years and never noticed.
I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t have much practice with desire that arrives like this—slowly, creeping through a door I didn’t even know was there.