Do You Remember(69)

I fit the small key into the lock of the drawer on Graham’s desk. But just before I can turn it, my hand trembles. I get a strange buzzing sensation in the back of my head, and all of a sudden, Graham’s office fades away to white. Then, gradually, another room comes into focus. It’s like I’ve been transported to somewhere different. Back down to the living room of my house.

Graham is at the front door, talking to somebody. He’s keeping his voice down, but the other person isn’t. The other person is shouting. As I step closer, I recognize the voice of the person standing outside our front door.

It’s my father.

“Let me in, Graham!” my father snaps at my husband. “This isn’t right!”

“I’m afraid this is a bad time,” Graham says in a maddeningly calm voice. “Tess is resting.”

“Bullshit!” I’ve never heard my father swear before—it’s shocking. “I can see her back there. Let me talk to her!”

“Douglas, you need to keep your voice down.”

I can just barely see my father’s face over Graham’s shoulder, through the crack in the open front door. His face is bright pink like he’s furious. “I want to see my daughter. Right. Now.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“This isn’t right!” My father’s voice is hoarse now. “Tess deserves to hear the truth. You can’t do this! You can’t keep her prisoner here like this!”

“I’m Tess’s husband and guardian,” Graham says calmly. “So I get to decide what I think is right for her. That’s not your job.”

“Tess!” My name sounds like an anguished cry on my father’s lips. “Tess! I need to talk to you!”

“I’m sorry, Douglas. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

I open my mouth, wanting to yell out to my father that I’m here, that I want to talk to him. But no words come out. I feel frozen—paralyzed. My father is a stone’s throw away, and there’s nothing I can do. Graham is preparing to lock the door to our house, shutting me inside and…

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.”