Undue Influence [antikvár]

PROLOGUE There is a special clarity of thought, an unclouded focus which is granted to those who shed all fear and panic, who in the end stare death in the eye, and who leave this world on their own terms. It was this clarity of mind that, in those final days, gave Nikki a superiority of will that I could not resist. Lingering as she was on the edge of death, I found myself unable to refuse her a thing. She would merely ask, and it would be as if she had cast some indefinable spell. All I could say was yes. Floating on an ether of immeasurable courage in a sea of white sheets and pillows, in her last days Nikki finally found her own form of undue influence over me. Nikki's doctors said she had a virulent strain. They called it "small oat cell cancer." Before they could move, it had metastasized, migrating from the lungs to a dozen other organs. In those weeks after the funeral, when I finally came to dodge my own self-pity, I dwelled most on the irony. That Nikki, who had never touched a cigarette in her life, who on sensing any negligible odor of smoke would turn on her heels and walk from the most crowded restaurant, who swore off as the foulest of vices all forms of tobacco—that Nikki should die of lung cancer. It was just eleven months from diagnosis to death. It has