Page 49 of The Unraveling

“We both know your diagnosis and symptoms, so we’ll skip the formal rehashing. How does that sound?” he says softly.

I nod, my focus trailing across the room as blood rushes in my ears. The shelf of wet specimens and the skeleton standing next to it holds my attention. “Are those bones real?”

I can feel his soft gaze on me as he says, “Yes, but they’re older than I am. I brought him all the way from England.”

My lips twitch with an almost-smile. “Ethically sourced?”

“I would hope.” He chuckles. “But I didn’t source them myself.”

Gaze remaining on the skull’s hollow eyes, I smirk and say, “Could always get a Ouija board and ask him.”

Despite giving me the chuckle I was wishing for, he sees through my avoidance with a gentle, “Isla.”

I jerk my gaze to him and clench the leather arm of the chair.

He smiles. “It’s refreshing that your humor remains alive and well.”

I want to make another joke, tell him that cancer can’t destroy everything, but my tongue is dry and a lump grows more solid in my throat.

Dr. Todd’s warm gaze holds mine. “I can relate to your pain, Isla. I was not terminal as you are, but I understand the helplessness of being ill. The inescapableness of it.”

I tangle my hands in my lap as I mull him over, looking for potential signs or scars of past suffering.

“Where I’m from, everything was poisoned. The air was toxic from coal burning. Food, like bread, was full of alum and chalk. People were scalded to death in their bathtubs. It was . . . horrific.” He draws in a deep breath and slowly releases it. “As a doctor, it was terrifying, knowing you were perpetually sick, eating and breathing toxins and not being able to do anything about it. But I found the antidote to my illness. And ever since, it’s been my mission to share it.”

My brow furrows, a strained chuckle escaping me. “It sounds like you’re talking about a different time. What was your diagnosis?”

A bright grin glides across his lips. “Mortality, Isla.”

As my lips part with a shallow exhale, I can’t help but glance toward the door. Perhaps I shouldn’t have entertained my mom’s desperation—allowed her to fund travel for . . . whatever this is.

“I understand how it sounds,” he says. “It’s easiest if I demonstrate.”

I bite my lip and return my attention to Dr. Todd. The defeat has me sinking in my chair, dread piling in my gut when he reaches into a drawer and withdraws a small, steel dagger. My heart pulses in my stark-dry throat as he unsheathes it and sets it against his wrist.

“Dr. Todd!” As my voice leaps out of me, my hand darts toward him but freezes mid-reach.

My gasp fills my ears as the blade splits the pale flesh of his wrist with crimson. There’s no sign of pain on his smooth expression as he lifts his arm above the desk and twists his wrist toward me, tendrils of blood trailing down his forearm like he wants me to witness the lack of trickery.

I can’t find the sense to lower my hand. The word madman rushes to my tongue. Of course he is. In this house, so late in the evening, operating in a study snatched out of a nineteenth century film.

The details of the room slip away as the bleeding ceases, the wound mending so impossibly swiftly. There’s no sign the blade ever neared him, though when my wide, unblinking gaze falls to his other hand, the crimson-slicked metal remains gripped in his pale fingers.

“See?” Dr. Todd says. “I found—possess—the antidote to all mortal afflictions.”

I float in my chair, some weighted part of me slipping away. Emptying me. It’s not something I can name—it’s as if I’ve faded into a dream, the sharp edges of reality now dull and blunt.

No words fill my mouth, only noisy breaths.

Dr. Todd sets the blade aside. My eyes follow it until he clasps his hands together in front of himself on the desk. “Your current reaction is normal,” he murmurs, voice softer than my oncologist’s when he basically told me I was doomed.

The dread of that conversation returns thick like the sound of my mother’s sobbing. Heavy, like her head falling onto my shoulder and her grip constricting my arm as she clung to me like I was floating off to her Heaven right there. But my oncologist’s assurances that nothing could be done—the cancer was too aggressive and caught far too late—set me on fire. A cold, eternal brand of fire. An anger so foundational and charring it burned itself apathetic.

Apathy. Perhaps that’s why I’m so willing to walk into a strange man’s home to appease my mother, while everyone I know remains back home in California, unable to protect me. I don’t want to die with her thinking I’ve given up on every fringe cure or healer she stumbles across when it feels like my fault for waiting too long for modern medicine to help.

A doctor—a researcher—called my mother late in the evening, not long after we received a notice about a data breach at the oncologist’s office. My mother was too desperate to put the pieces together. My father was stretched thin, the numbers on his notepad bleeding deeper through the yellow pages, tearing through some days, as he attempted to calculate how to survive the cost of treatments that my oncologist swore would likely fail, and how to keep our home and my two younger brothers fed.

And I, too despairing, was suffocating in that house.