"I understand," I said, even though I didn't.
Mr. Thorne opened a drawer and took out a small black case. He stood and circled the desk until he stood above me, so close that I might have reached out and touched the hem of his pinstripe suit jacket. He was, I thought, quite tall.
He set the case on the edge of the desk and unzipped it, opening it to reveal a kind of blood collection kit. I sat up straighter. With the last round of medication, I'd become used to regular injections, but I still wouldn't say that I was exactly blasé about needles.
And anyhow, blood collection? In an office? That was…unconventional.
"The results of the screening will indicate if you are a good candidate for the procedure," Mr. Thorne said. He selected a needle from the array inside the case, locking it into a holder. "But you must know, even if the outcome is encouraging, the treatment is only successful in a small minority of cases."
"How small?" I asked, as much to distract myself from his preparations as out of a desire to know the answer. I could always Google for details later.
"One in a hundred," he said. "Perhaps less."
"Oh," I said in a little voice. "That is small."
"And if the procedure is unsuccessful, it always results in death," he continued.
"Wait, what?" What the hell kind of procedure was that? "So a one percent chance of cure, and a ninety-nine percent chance of death? That doesn't sound like smart odds to me."
He looked up from the needle. His gaze pierced me, his eyes deep and hollow under his straight black brows. As handsome as he was, he didn't exactly look the picture of health, either. "What are your chances now?"
I opened my mouth, then shut it. My chances were exactly nil. Put that way, gambling on an outside chance didn't seem quite so insane.
"That is why we only select terminal patients," he said, pulling out a glass blood collection tube.
"What about relapse?" I demanded. As a cancer patient, I'd learned that the disease could lurk in my body for months or years, undetectable until it spread out again to kill me.
"There is no risk of relapse. If you are cured, you are cured." That mesmerizing gaze caught me again. "Forever."
He dropped to one knee next to my chair, and my heart did an unexpected backflip. Oh, God, he was a beautiful man, more beautiful than he had any right to be. I tried to think about something else, anything else, because this certainly wasn't the right kind of response of a patient to her doctor. But this close, I could smell his cologne, all sandalwood, leather, and musk, and my mind refused to obey my order to find something else to dwell on. Pink elephants, pink elephants, pink elephants....