The living room fades away to white again, and now I’m back in Graham’s office. I look down and realize that I’m still gripping the key to the drawer in Graham’s desk. My fingers are trembling and sweaty, but they still work. They don’t even have to put the key in the lock. It’s already in there. All I have to do is turn it.
There’s something in this drawer that I need to see. My father knows the truth and Graham will do anything to keep him from telling me. And now, for reasons I can’t understand, Harry didn’t want me to look in the drawer. I can’t even imagine why. Like Camila said, I deserve to know the truth. Once and for all.
So I turn the key.
Chapter 42
I don’t know what I expected to find when I opened the drawer. Bottles of some hallucinogenic? A signed confession from Graham? None of that is in the drawer.
What’s in the drawer is paper. A huge stack of paper.
And the first page has my name on it.
I glance behind me. I’m still alone in Graham’s office. So I pull the stack of papers out of the drawer and rest them on his desk. I turn the first page and I start to read. And I keep reading. Page after page after page.
Oh God.
Oh no. I can’t believe this. No wonder Harry didn’t want me to open the drawer.
No no no no no…
“Tess?”
I was so absorbed in what I was reading that I didn’t even see Graham enter the room. He’s standing behind me in a clean shirt and slacks. His blue eyes behind his glasses look incredibly sad.
“I never wanted you to read that,” he says.
I drop into the leather chair in front of his desk because my knees can’t support me anymore. I find myself gasping for air.
“I’m so sorry,” he says.
“How…” I croak. “How did it happen?”
He exhales loudly. “It started over a year ago. Every morning when you woke up, you would complain about terrible headaches, always on the right side. I kept telling you to go to the doctor, but… well, you know how you are about doctors.” A corner of his mouth quirks up, even though there’s nothing funny about what I just read. “The headaches kept getting worse, and then one day while you were driving, you crashed your car. The accident was minor, but it turns out it happened because you had a seizure while driving.”
I cover my mouth, barely able to listen to this. But nothing he’s telling me is a surprise after what I just read in the stacks of my medical records from Mount Sinai.
“When they took you to the hospital after the accident, they found a large tumor in the right side of your brain,” Graham says. “They did surgery to try to remove it, but they couldn’t get it all. The pathology came back saying it was a malignant tumor. Stage four. Glioblastoma.”
Those are the words written on every doctor’s note in the stack. From neurosurgeons to neuro-oncologists to neurologists.
Stage four cancer.
Glioblastoma.
Poor prognosis.
Terminal.
“They tried doing chemotherapy treatment for a short time,” he goes on, even though I wish he would stop. “But you hated it. You hated going to the doctor so often. You hated the side effects of the medication. And it wasn’t working. So you decided to stop treatment.”
And then a memory comes back to me. Sitting in front of the desk of a doctor. The doctor has a white beard and a grave expression on his face. There’s nothing more we can do, Mrs. Thurman. I’m so sorry.
The realization that I was going to die. The same way my mother did.
Graham takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes with his fingers. “I thought you might be at peace after we decided to stop treatment, but you weren’t. You were miserable. You woke up every day, acting like you were already dead. You couldn’t stand the idea of wasting away like your mother did. We tried anti-depressants, therapy… but nothing worked. You had so little time left, and it felt like you were going to spend that time wishing you were already dead. So that’s when your psychiatrist got the idea…”
I lift my eyes. I already know what he’s going to say—I almost remember it—but I want to hear him say it.
“It was an injectable drug in a clinical trial to treat victims of trauma.” He slides his glasses back on his nose. “It affects recent short-term memory. The idea was that I would give you an injection every night, and you would forget your diagnosis. And you could be happy for the remaining time you had left.” He shakes his head. “And it worked. Really well. I mean, yes, there were gaps in your memory and you couldn’t work anymore, but you couldn’t work anymore anyway because of the tumor. You were happy again. We explained the scar on your head by telling you that you were in an accident, and generally, you enjoyed your days.”