"Your lab results are in. Good news. You are an excellent candidate for the procedure."
"What?" I hit a high note that I hadn't intended. "I mean-I'm so...so pleased," I stuttered, still not certain that I had heard correctly.
After two months of bad news, to have something, even this small, seem to go right.... I half-considered pinching myself. Did people really do that?
The man on the phone continued coolly. "I can tell, Ms. Shaw. A car will be sent around to your apartment this evening. Six o'clock."
"I-I have to make the decision now?" I asked.
"No, Ms. Shaw. This is in the interest of full disclosure. Mr. Thorne will explain the procedure in detail, and you can decide how-and if-you wish to proceed."
If. A welter of emotions hit me at that word, and I remembered again the strangeness of our first meeting, the compulsion, the weird discord between what he presented to me and what he seemed to be. The light in his eyes, my blood a red smear across his hand…. I had kept all those thoughts clamped down, shut tight, because I had no choice. There could be no choice.
Not if I wanted to live.
"Okay," I said, ignoring the tightening in my center that I did not care to name. "I'll be ready, then. Six o'clock."
"Excellent. Goodbye, Ms. Shaw."
"Bye," I said, but the man was already gone.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Six o'clock. A car would be waiting.
Okay, then.
***
"Can you explain to me again why you're wearing your interview skirt?" Lisette asked, frowning at me from the door to my bedroom. "And the blouse? To a doctor's appointment?"
"It isn't an appointment, exactly," I said. "More like a...consultation, or something."
"Isn't that like a British word for a doctor's appointment?" she said.
I adjusted the chignon at the back of my neck one more time. The one good thing about alemtuzumab was that unlike most chemotherapy, it didn't make your hair fall out. I still had the same ash brown waves that I'd always had, which, though not the most striking hair color, was a far sight better than being bald.
The bad thing about alemtuzumab, I thought, is that it didn't work.
"Look, the last time I showed up to a consultation or appointment or whatever there, everybody was in business clothes." I dabbed concealer generously over the dark circles under my hollowed-out eyes.
"At a clinic," Lisette said flatly.
"I think the initial meetings are held at the corporate office," I said. "Anyway, if I'm going back there, I don't want to stick out again."