Ethan steps back and steadies himself against the wall. "She's too sick to be here. Why isn't she at a hospital?"

Her mother answers from behind us. "Allys is assigned to Comfort Care only. Her liver is shutting down. And her lungs. Heart. Kidneys. Shall I go on? Pretty much all of her organs are in some stage of failure. And on top of that, her condition has triggered systemic lupus. Her body is basically attacking itself."

"What about a transplant?" Ethan asks.

"Which organ? She has too many involved. The numbers add up fast. They said she is beyond saving."

"There was damage when she had her last illness," her father adds. "We knew that. But they thought medications would control the damage. She was doing so well. We thought . . ."

He breaks. I watch him sob, hang on to the wall, wiping his eyes, embarrassed, and then looking down, pinching at the bridge of his nose. His shoulders quake and soft moaning breaths escape as he tries to suppress his grief. I have never seen my own father sob. But now the soft breaths of this man cut through me, weaken me, and I fear I may fall to my knees. These are sounds I have heard before. The sounds of a grown man crying when there is nothing left to do. The sounds of my father.

I grab Ethan's arm and pull him into the room. Allys turns her head as we enter. Ethan can't suppress his reaction. "Oh, God."

"You're no prize either, Ethan." Her voice is raspy and weak.

"Allys," I say. She is small, sunken into sheets and pillows, like she is already half swallowed up by another world. Except for her right arm, her prosthetics are gone, stored away. Her . stumps barely peek from her gown. An oxygen tube lies across her upper lip, and a large patch is pressed against her chest.

"Come closer," she says. "It's hard to talk."

Ethan goes to one side of her bed, and I, to the other. "We didn't know you were so sick," he says.

She smiles, her lips a weak yellow smear across her face. "That's an understatement. I'm dying. When organs start shutting down, it doesn't take long. I always knew it was a possibility. My parents were in denial." She makes an effort at a chuckle. "Maybe I was, too." She coughs, her face wincing in pain from the effort. She presses a button on a pad near her fingertips. The patch on her chest clicks. "Sweet elixir," she says and smiles.

"Allys, is there anything we can do?" I ask.

"No, Jenna. It's all been done. This little train was set in motion decades ago by people who thought they were above the system. It will probably take decades more to stop it. Only the FSEB can fix this mess we've made. But it's too late for me. With everything I would need, my numbers would be way over the top. It's the law, remember?"

I am silent. For someone so sick, her voice is amazingly harsh.

"Hold my hand," she says.

Ethan reaches out.

"No. Jenna. I want Jenna to hold my hand."

Ethan and I look at each other. How can you deny a dying person a simple wish? I reach across her bed and take her prosthetic hand. "Your hand is so soft. Much softer than mine." She touches gently at first, then squeezes hard. She pulls at me. "Closer," she says. I lean down until my face is close to hers, her sweet, sickly breaths hot against my cheek. She pushes up as far as her left stump will allow, and she whispers into my ear.

She lets go and falls back into her pillow, and I step back.

"What's the secret?" Ethan asks.

"It's not a secret," she answers and then closes her eyes, her sweet elixir doing its job for another fifteen minutes.

Ethan swipes at one eye with the heel of his hand and clears his throat. "We should go," he says.

We say good-bye, but Allys has already fallen asleep.

Her father walks us to the door. His composure is regained. He has returned to the tired man who greeted us, a circle of calm of his own making. "Thank you for coming," he says. "I know it meant a lot to her."

Her mother hurries out to the porch before we leave. "You. Jenna. You live on Lone Ranch Road, don't you?"

"Yes."

"I thought so," she says. She turns without saying anything else and goes back into the house.

Ethan and I leave, retracing the steps that brought us here. We don't speak until we get out to the main highway.

"I guess it's moot at this point," Ethan sighs.

"What's that?"

"Allys won't be telling anyone about you now."

I stare out the window. The landscape sweeps past as a gray blur because I am focused on a distance somewhere between the window and the world around me. An inexact distance that holds nothing but Ally's words. Ethan underestimates her. "She already did," I tell him. "That's what she whispered to me. That's what she meant. It's not a secret. She told her parents. She told them to report me."

A swath of red flushes Ethan's face beneath his eyes and his hands tighten on the steering wheel. "I won't take you home," he says. "You can come to my house. Anywhere. I'll take you somewhere where no one will find you. . . ."

Ethan continues his desperate plans for my escape, but I find myself drifting, wondering where Ethan's anywhere might be, caught up in a world of maybes and what-ifs and wanting to stay there because it is a much safer world for me to be in than the one I am.

Leaving and Staying

I almost could.

I could almost leave and never look back.