A Raging Dawn Read Online Free

greeting you gave a patient, not a friend. She saw me staring at the man. “Oh, sorry. This is Tommaso Lazaretto, a visiting neurofellow from Penn. Tommaso, this is Dr. Angela Rossi. Tommaso has done some work in prion diseases, so he’s very interested in your case.”
    I transferred my stare to her and arched one eyebrow. I felt an illicit rush of satisfaction when she flushed. “Tommaso, why don’t you wait outside? Angela and I have a few things to discuss.”
    To his credit, Tommaso stepped forward and took my hand. “I’m so pleased to meet you, Dr. Rossi.” He had the faintest of Italian accents. “I’m sorry it’s under such unfortunate circumstances. I look forward to working with you.”
    I gave him a lukewarm handshake, having no patience for niceties. Not when Louise held my future in that file in her hands. Tommaso left, carefully closing the door behind him. Leaving me and Louise and my unnamed diagnosis trapped inside the tiny room.
    Louise leaned against the closed door, looking down at where I sat on the swivel stool traditionally reserved for the physician. I’d taken it by habit and, once on it, couldn’t bring myself to move to the patient exam table.
    I drew in my breath, steeling myself. Didn’t even give her time to take the other chair and sit down. “What did the DNA results show?”
    Her face told me everything I needed to know. “We were able to isolate your father’s DNA from the sample you brought in.” I’d stolen my dad’s old straight razor from my mom’s stash of his keepsakes. “The results confirmed my suspicions. Although there are some abnormal genetic markers, your father tested positive for Fatal Familial Insomnia.”
    Her voice was steady, clinical. I was glad. If she’d shown emotion, I don’t think I could have handled that.
    She sank into the chair beside me as I processed this new reality. A strange fog of relief swirled through me, leaving me with goose bumps in its wake. “Do you think—could he have had symptoms already? Back then? I mean…” My voice trailed off, a breathless sigh of hope.
    Could twenty-two years of family lore be wrong? Because if fatal insomnia, with its muscle spasms, hallucinations, and sudden fugue states—episodes that left a person catatonic for a period of time—had caused my dad’s accident, then I wasn’t to blame. For the first time in my life, I could forgive myself for being the reason why he was out on the road that stormy night, coming to pick me up after yet another afterschool detention. Maybe the rest of the family would finally forgive me as well.
    Louise didn’t have to check her notes. “Yes. It’s definitely possible that he already had symptoms. I’d love to learn more about his family, especially anyone else who died young.”
    “Sorry, there’s no one. His mother brought him here from Italy after his father died, and she died—cancer—before I was born.” The facts helped distance me from the emotional tug-of-war raging in my mind. If Dad had fatal insomnia, then the odds I had it were fifty-fifty. Not just me, but my little sister as well. How the hell was I going to break it to Mom and Evie that she was at risk?
    “And me?” I asked, sucking in my gut, preparing for the one-two punch.
    She hesitated. “Indeterminate.” That was the problem with testing for a disease that only hit one in one hundred million people. “We’ll repeat it, of course. But given your symptoms, with him testing positive, I don’t see any other possibility for a diagnosis.”
    Louise was the smartest person I knew. And the best doctor. If she had ruled out every other possibility, then that was that. The disease that had killed my father and let me off the hook for his death was also the disease that would kill me.
    Okay. Okay . Now I knew what the enemy was—a microscopic protein known as a prion—the same thing that caused mad cow disease. A nasty, traitorous, crumbled clump of tissue had contaminated my brain,