Facing the blank white door, I realized that Mr. Thorne had only answered half my question. I rocked tensely onto the balls of my feet.
I should leave now, before it was too late. I should stop chasing this dream before it led me to hell.
This was all wrong. Somewhere in the base of my brain, an alarm was jangling, getting louder, screaming out against this place, this man. Who would perform medical procedures in his own home, alone, other than a quack or a butcher? Where were the doctors? The nurses? Their lab coats and stethoscopes and clipboards, their machines that beeped and hissed?
But I knew there were none. Somehow, I had always known it.
Those thoughts were distant and small next to my awareness of the man in the next room. I could hardly hear them over the pounding of my heart. My head was still spinning with seeing him, being near him, my body burning from the ghost of his fingers on my back.
I knew I was about to find out exactly what he wanted from me-what he was, that he could do such impossible things to my mind.
I should get out of there, but I didn't move.
I couldn't.
If I left, I was dead, anyway. Not tonight. Not this week, even. But I wouldn't make it past spring. My life was a road that had been washed out by cancer-a broken dead end with nothing beyond. No way to reach the tidy little future I'd always wanted. The future that would prove to my Gramma that everything she'd done had been worth it.
No matter what happened, this was my only chance. It was my straw to grasp, my one-in-one-hundred shot at life.
If Mr. Thorne had lied to me, I would have believed him. When he spoke, I would believe anything. But I knew he wasn't lying, just as I knew he was there, on the other side of the door. Waiting for me.
And I knew that once I stepped into that room, I would do anything for him. Even give him the life I so desperately wanted to save.
Tearing my gaze from the blank door, I looked around the small, bare room. A narrow padded bench sat against the wall across from a row of pegs, from which a white garment hung limply with a pair of soft white slippers underneath.
I knew what I would do-what I had to do. Mechanically, I stripped down to my skin, folding my clothes and placing them in a neat stack upon the bench, goosebumps springing up over my body.