Page 216

Then I find new ones and start the cycle again.

Elena is too weak to fight me. She just closes her eyes and lets me drag her through it. “You’re torturing me,” she whispers once, after a particularly brutal examination leaves her shaking and gray-faced on the table. The oncologist had palpated her abdomen so thoroughly that she’d vomited bile into a plastic basin I held for her.

I wipe her mouth with a cloth. My hands are steady. My heart is anything but.

“I know,” I say. “I don’t care.”

When one of the doctors suggests stem cell donation as a possibility, I sign the forms without bothering to read them. I rip off my shirt and lie face-down on the operating table while they carve into me.

The pain is excruciating. Each procedure leaves fresh wounds across my back, scars layering over scars. I lose count of how many times they open me up. Four harvests. Seven. Nine. The anesthesia stops working properly, but I tell them to keep going anyway.

When Elena sees what I’ve done, she weeps. “You selfish bastard!” she sobs, her thin fingers tracing the bandages across my spine. I’m lying on my stomach because sitting up is impossible, and she’s perched on the edge of the bed, her IV pole rattling as she shakes with rage. “You’re carving yourself apart and it won’t change anything.”

We argue about it, and she gets so angry that she won’t let me feed her her dinners anymore. But she’s right: The stem cells don’t take. Her body rejects them the way it’s rejected every other intervention I’ve thrown at it. The cancer keeps spreading, devouring her from the inside out, and all my money, all my power, all the violence I’ve inflicted on the world—none of it matters here.

We haven’t told Kirill how badly things are going. It’s best that way. The less he sees of this nightmare, the better.

The end comes without warning.

It’s a cold night in March. I’m adjusting her pillows, trying to find an angle that doesn’t make her wince, when her hand closes around my wrist.

“Lu. Help me get dressed.”

I know right away what this is. I want to argue. There’s a fucking miracle out there, but we can’t give up looking for it. But I look at her face, and Iknow.

I’ve known for a while, really. I just couldn’t bear to admit it.

My hands tremble as I help her sit up. She’s so light now. Hollow. I could snap her in half without trying.

“The red one,” she says. “In the closet. You know the one.”

I do. It’s the sundress she was wearing when we met. Well, not quitethesundress. I bought her a new one years ago, identical to the original, because the first had worn too thin from washing. She’s kept this replacement hanging in the back of the closet, pristine.Waiting.

I pull it over her head as gently as I can. The fabric swallows her now. It hangs loose where it used to cling. But when I step back, I see her, and my heart cracks clean in two.

She’s beautiful. Still so fucking beautiful.

I go to the kitchen and crush the pills we planned for this. I mix them into a jar of applesauce, because her throat is too weak to swallow anything else properly now.

She’s waiting where I left her, propped against the headboard. When she sees me, she smiles. It’s the first true smile I’ve seen from her in a long time.

I sit beside her on the bed. My hands are shaking so badly now that the spoon rattles against the jar’s edge. I nearly drop it, until Elena reaches up and takes my wrist. She steadies it and guides the spoon to her own mouth.

We don’t speak of the things that matter most. We’ve already said them, over and over, in the twenty years we’ve had together. She asks me to make her a promise, and I swear to her I’ll see it through.

“Thank you,” she whispers once I’ve made my reluctant vow.

When she finishes eating, I set the bowl aside. She settles back against my chest, and I wrap my arms around her—so careful of her fragile bones, terrified I’ll hurt her even now—and I feel her heart beat against my palm.

Slower.

Slower.

Then still.

The night is moonless. There is no light left in the world.

I carry her wrapped in a wool blanket, cradled against my chest like a sleeping child. She weighs nothing. Less than nothing. The cancer hollowed her out long before the pills finished the job.