Still Falling For You

by Holly Miller

Genres: Romantic Fantasy; Romance; Later in Life Romance; Romantic Comedy; Science Fiction Romance; Time Travel Romance

Synopsis

'A clever romance with some OMG spoilers and a bucketload of heartache. I laughed, I cried, I fell in love. Holly always writes books that have me turning the pages as the tears fall. Another triumph' CESCA MAJOR

'One Day meets The Notebook in this epic love story' CHARLOTTE BUTTERFIELD

'Immersive, transportive and achingly moving, it made me laugh, cry, and turn the pages long into the night' JENNY ASHCROFT

'Holly Miller does it again. Moving, beautiful and achingly romantic' BECKY HUNTER

'A sweeping, gorgeous love story with a high concept edge . . . I was hooked, heartbroken, and utterly transported' ELEANOR RAY

Readers are raving about international bestseller Holly Miller

'There are literally tears still dripping from my chin. What an extraordinary book. It's exquisitely written, incredibly moving and impossible to put down' BETH O'LEARY
'Unique and breathtaking and painful and broken and perfect . . . just like love' JODI PICOULT
'Clever, poignant and very, very special' WOMAN & HOME

'It's a long time since a book made me cry, but I sobbed reading this' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'The love story of the decade' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
'Wonderfully original and perfectly executed' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
'Absolutely, truly, amazing' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

THEY SAY TRUE LOVE LASTS FOREVER. BUT WHAT IF IT REALLY COULD?

Josh is 18. Rachel is 18.
From the first night they meet as freshers, Rachel and Josh know they are meant to be. An electric connection quickly blossoms into plans to spend the rest of their lives together.

Josh is 29. Rachel is 29.
Inexplicably, none of the men in Josh's family has lived past the age of thirty. As the fateful birthday approaches, Josh is wracked with fears: of his own death, and of leaving Rachel alone in this world.

So when a genius scientist offers him a radical new treatment - which might just save Josh's future with Rachel - how can he possibly say no?

Josh is 29. Rachel is 31.
Rachel wanted nothing more than to grow old with her soulmate, surrounded by the family they longed for. Now, faced with the impossibility of that dream, she has a heartbreaking choice to make. Does the pursuit of happiness mean more to her than true love?

Release date: February 5, 2026

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

10.

Rachel

March 2000

‘Well, shit. A pill that keeps you young. Where do I sign?’ says Ingrid, setting down three mugs of tea and a plate of buttered crumpets on her coffee table. It is late, and this was unplanned – Are you free? I need you – and she is wrapped in a pale pink dressing gown that swamps her slight frame.

‘Don’t get any ideas,’ I mumble.

‘You run a wellbeing company,’ Polly reminds Ingrid. ‘Isn’t popping pills against your core values or something?’

Ingrid flicks on a lamp. The room glows gold. ‘So’s eating buttered crumpets, babe. I won’t tell if you won’t.’

Polly turns back to me. Her shoulders are damp from the hair wash she rushed to finish when I called, her usually sleek auburn waves now fated to be twice their usual size in the morning. ‘And you have no clue where Josh got it?’

‘Some kind of doctor.’

It’s the first time I’ve ever lied to my friends, and it doesn’t feel good. But Josh asked me to keep to myself – for the time being, at least – that the invention was Wilf’s. Not that I would have had the strength of mind to stand between Polly's wrath and Wilf right now anyway.

They exchange a glance. ‘Bloody hell. You should get on to the BMA.’

I pick a crumpet from the plate and take a huge bite, wipe butter from my lips. ‘Not practising.’

I wish I could tell them the truth, not least to confide my fear that Josh will feel some kind of moral obligation to repay what Wilf has done for him by taking that pill too.

Still. Even half a confession feels good. The storm that’s been rumbling in my stomach ever since Josh told me about Wilf’s invention is beginning to subside.

‘You’re not going to take it, right, Rach?’ Polly asks, her face crumpled with concern.

‘She won’t even try my home brew,’ Ingrid reminds her, through a mouthful of crumpet.

‘I mean, I wouldn’t, ordinarily,’ I say.

Polly takes my hand and grips it, as if we’re at the top of a rollercoaster in the moments before it plummets. ‘Well, then, you shouldn’t. You don’t need to take it.’

‘Maybe I do. Maybe this is the kind of thing . . . Josh and I should do together.’

‘Because you’re married?’ Ingrid snorts. ‘If you need something to obey, make it your own instincts.’

‘We left obey out of our vows, remember?’

‘Exactly.’

Polly fixes me with hazel eyes. ‘But once you’ve taken this pill there’s no going back, right? The effects would be permanent.’

‘Well, yes,’ I say, my voice small. ‘But so is death.’

Ingrid tuts. ‘If Josh really believes he’s doomed to an early death, that’s what you need to address. There’s no pill that can fix that.’

I play devil’s advocate. ‘Look at all his relatives. He can’t rewrite history.’

‘Okay,’ says Polly. ‘Maybe we need to be practical about this. Say he does take the pill. If you have kids, when they turn twenty, Josh will be in his fifties. But he’ll look like—’

‘—he’s twenty-something,’ Ingrid muses, then nods at me. ‘Steady, cougar.’

‘This isn’t funny. What about when I’m sixty? Josh will look – or be – half my age.’

‘Hmm. Might be good for his book sales, I suppose.’

‘What? How?’

She shrugs. ‘Curiosity sells.’

‘Ingrid—’

‘I jest. Listen, I don’t actually think you should worry. If it came down to it, I’d be willing to bet Josh wouldn’t take it.’

I consider this. Perhaps she is right, though I can’t deny Josh does have an impulsive streak. A part of his personality that leans into risk, if the weather is just right. His enthusiasm for buying the flat which every expert we’d encountered had warned us not to touch. Some worryingly fearless potholing with Darren in Wales that time. Befriending the particularly aggressive border collie that used to live next door to Ingrid. Agreeing to take a ride in a helicopter flown by a guy seemingly keen to impress Josh’s mum, who might or might not have actually been qualified to pilot the thing.

I frown. ‘I’m not sure Josh thinks it’s that much of a risk, though. Or maybe that’s what he’s telling himself, anyway. He reckons everyone’s going to be taking them soon.’

Polly looks alarmed. In the lamplight, her high cheekbones are gilded gold. ‘But who knows what could be in them?’

I’m so close to saying, I do trust Wilf, in a way, and only just stop myself.

‘Would either of you take it?’ I say instead. ‘Joking aside.’

‘Nah,’ Ingrid says, after less than a moment’s consideration. ‘I’m quite looking forward to getting old. Can’t wait to be able to get away with some of the shit my nan does. The woman is outrageous.’

I smile, despite myself. The latest story to come out of the nursing home was that Nana Watson had recently feigned what amounted to a full psychotic break just to liven up an otherwise boring Tuesday.

‘Poll?’ I say, turning to my oldest friend.

‘A tablet to preserve me like this? Christ, no,’ she says, almost apologetically. ‘Might have when I was eighteen, though.’

Ingrid reaches out and takes my hand, which she doesn’t do very often, not being predisposed to tactility. I try not to look at the skull ring on her middle finger, the rubies for eyes seemingly trying to find mine.

‘The only thing you both need to do now is hang tight,’ she says. ‘In a year’s time we’ll be sitting here saying how relieved we are that all this is behind us. Trust me. It’s going to be okay.’

11.

Josh

March 2000

A few nights after I tell Rachel about the pill, she gets home from work to find me and Wilf in the living room.

‘I thought it might be useful for us all to sit down and talk,’ I say, as she pauses in the doorway.

She looks doubtful about this, probably because Wilf’s usually a man of few words. He even declined to be my best man because he didn’t think he’d have enough to say in a speech.

The flat smells of toast, and the coffee table is covered with empty mugs and piles of paper printouts, as though we’ve been chairing a council of war. I mean, the past couple of hours have actually been something of a battle for me, on the brainpower front, as Wilf has been attempting to walk me through a paper he’s drafted on the mechanics of the pill.

Objectively speaking, his genius staggers me. The potential of this thing. What if everyone took it at, say, the age of twenty-one? How many illnesses and early deaths could be averted? How many lives transformed?

Rachel takes a seat in the armchair near the fireplace. As she does, I notice her mascara is smudged. Has she been crying?

The bank where she works in HR has recently been taken over by a bigger bank with fewer scruples, which means part of her job is now to fire a load of her colleagues and dress it up as redundancy. This, I know, is the kind of corporate savagery that keeps her awake at night. It’s got worse since she became a manager last year, which has meant daily full-body immersion into the choppy waters of office politics.

But my wife is nothing if not determined. I know without having to ask that she’s going to stick it out.

I meet her eye and mouth, ‘You okay?’

She nods, shoots me a little talk later wink.

I offer her tea, but she declines, removing her heels and suit jacket, twisting her loose hair into a topknot.

Wilf picks up the book I’ve been reading from the arm of the sofa. Jurassic Park. He flicks through it. ‘Interesting choice.’

He knows me too well. ‘Coincidence,’ I mumble.

Rachel frowns as if she has no idea what we’re talking about, which might feasibly be true, since she turned down my invite to come and watch a film about dinosaurs when it was released, in favour of a night drinking pisco sours with Polly and Ingrid.

Wilf dunks a biscuit into his mug of tea. ‘Right. I should say from the outset that what we discuss doesn’t leave this room.’

‘Fine,’ Rachel says. Then, ‘So, you really took this pill?’

Wilf shrugs. ‘I wouldn’t expect Josh to be my guinea pig. I had seizures and clots in mind, things like that. Look, in an ideal world the pill would have gone through more rounds of testing at this point, but time’s not on—’

I feel my stomach upturn. ‘Hang on. You took that pill for me?’

‘Yes?’ he says, through a mouthful of custard cream.

‘Can its effects be reversed?’ Rachel says.

She told me the other night, when we finally sat down to eat our cod and artichokes at getting on for midnight, that as far as she was concerned this was the point upon which there could be zero margin for error.

‘No. The pill alters the body on a cellular level. There’s no changing your mind.’

‘You say that like it’s not a big deal.’

She directs this at Wilf, but really I know she is speaking to me. To try to remind me. Because she knows that – in the absence of fear – I would ordinarily never contemplate doing something like this.

I’ve been known to make the odd questionable decision over the years. Ignoring the warnings about our money-pit flat. Bleaching my hair for a dare that time. Strapping myself into a helicopter with that weirdo who wanted to date my mum.

But this . . . this is different. It’s funny, what fear can do – the logic it can assign to insanity. Pulling a trigger. Trying to win your money back from the bookies. Freezing on the spot, when in fact you need to flee.

Wilf appears to concurrently consider and reject Rachel’s statement. ‘Everyone’s scared of things they don’t understand.’

At this, I have to step in. ‘I don’t think this is necessarily a brainpower issue, mate.’

‘I agree,’ says Wilf, sipping his tea and reaching for another biscuit. ‘In fact, I was referring to the kind of knowledge commonly referred to as explicit—’

‘Sorry, but isn’t this all a bit Dolly-the-sheep?’ Rachel blurts.

We both look at her.

‘Um, what?’ I say gently.

‘Well,’ she says carefully, clearly mindful that Wilf likely feels towards his invention as most people do their firstborn child, ‘you could argue it’s no different. From cloning a sheep, I mean. It might be seen as trying to play God, messing with the natural order of things.’

‘I don’t believe in God,’ Wilf says. ‘And anyway, the creation of Dolly has transformed the landscape of scientific thinking. Her birth indicates that therapeutic cloning is a genuine possibility. Cloning technology could create healthy tissues which could then be transplanted to heal—’

‘Sorry – why are we talking about cloning?’ I ask.

‘People have said the same about every world-changing invention,’ Wilf points out. ‘The light bulb. The telephone. Bicycles. Penicillin.’

Rachel and I both know we have about as much chance of winning a scientific debate with Wilf as we do of standing on the podium at the next Olympic Games.

But not everything comes down to how big your brain cells are.

 

The next morning, I wake feeling brighter. Deep down, I know this is because what Wilf has done has given me hope. He’s thrown me a lifeline I never thought could or would exist. Now, I might actually have a way out of the early death I have felt so sure for so long is coming for me.

And Rachel is at least willing to talk about it. She hasn’t shut it down. I am optimistic, perhaps for the first time, that we can come to some kind of agreement about what to do next.

I wake her with a kiss. I am already showered and dressed, off to work early to prep for class with a coffee on campus.

‘I love you,’ I whisper.

‘Josh?’ Her skin is warm from the bed, her eyes still part-drugged with sleep.

‘Yeah.’

‘Promise me you won’t take it without telling me.’

‘What?’

Her pupils chase mine. ‘The pill. Just . . . promise me you won’t take it. Not without telling me.’

‘Of course I won’t. I wouldn’t. I promise.’

‘You don’t owe Wilf anything. I know he’s done all of this for you . . . but you didn’t ask him to.’

‘I know.’

‘Hey, come here.’

I hesitate, stomach twitching. ‘What?’

‘You have time,’ she whispers, with a smile.

‘I really don’t.’

But even as I’m saying it I’m kneeling over her on the mattress, pressing my lips to hers. We kiss, softly at first and then more hungrily. I keep insisting I have to go, I really need to prep, I’ll be late. But the whole while, I am easing away the satin straps of her top, and she is reaching down to feel me, smilingly unzipping my fly, and I am breathing, ‘Fuck,’ then, ‘Wait, wait, socks, socks,’ laughing as I kick them off. She flicks my belt undone and tugs down my jeans, the underwear I put on less than ten minutes ago. She sits up, pushes me gently on to my back. Works her way down my body, then closes her mouth around me. I sling my head back and bite my lip, one hand lost in her hair. I tug the duvet into my other fist, shudders of pleasure passing from me to her as I feel myself depart earth.

12.

Rachel

May 2000

‘It’s the sort of thing my mother would have done, you know.’

Josh prongs a chip with a wooden fork. ‘What is?’

‘Taking that pill,’ I say, flicking a shard of batter on to the shingle for the gulls.

Dad has told me Mum was always trying to jump-start her feelings, endorphin her ennui away. She liked to drink, and gamble. She once bought a stake in a bar – an inordinate amount of money for two people on average incomes trying to raise a child – without consulting my father. An investment, she insisted with a jutting chin, which was when the shouting started. Neither Dad nor I were surprised when the whole venture purportedly got mothballed not long after she left us.

Josh and I have come to the south coast for the early bank holiday, to a cosy little B&B right on the beach. We have spent the past two days meandering through cobbled streets, skimming stones across the gunmetal sea, feeling the sting of salt spray on our faces, tasting it on our tongues. We stopped by the town’s only bookshop, a crooked Tudor-beamed haven where I was delighted to discover they had copies of Josh’s first three novels. I arranged them facing out in a row, covering up the memoir of a politician we both despised. Josh bought an armful of books before we left, in case they’d been watching us on CCTV.

We are sitting on the beach with trays of fish and chips, watching the sun drop through a tangerine sky.

‘I had one of those full-body MOTs,’ Josh says.

It comes out of nowhere. For a moment, I think he is talking about our car.

‘They check everything. Heart disease risk, kidneys, cholesterol . . . everything. Anyway, the results came in the post yesterday.’

‘And?’

‘I’m in perfect health. Nothing underlying.’

In my heart, a chink of light. Nothing underlying means he’s not going to die early. He doesn’t need to take that pill. He’s in the clear.

Maybe this is why he suggested coming away. For a fresh start, a hopeful new beginning.

But I only need to look at him to realise I have gravely misunderstood. I know every nuance of his body language so intimately. What every grade of smile means, each increment of a frown. All the pauses between his words, filled with meaning to no one but me.

‘So, now I know my body’s healthy . . . it’s the optimum time to preserve it.’

I feel a jolt of alarm, like waking up to breaking glass at night. ‘Doesn’t it prove the opposite? That you don’t need to take it? This shows they were panic attacks, Josh. You’ve survived every one of them. It’s fear – not your body failing.’

He turns to face me. His skin is burnished copper by the sunset. ‘You still haven’t told me how you really feel, you know. About taking the second pill. So we both . . . you know.’

Stay the same age forever.

I nudge the chips with my fork, decide maybe I’ve had enough. ‘Do I need to?’

‘You won’t consider it?’

‘No, I would. I mean, I am considering it. How could I not, if you’re saying this is what you want to do?’ I frown. ‘But still, I can’t quite . . . picture how it would look.’

‘Never having to worry about getting ill, or dying from disease,’ he suggests softly. ‘Not leaving the people we love. Always having our health.’

I shut my eyes and try to imagine it: being forever in our twenties. Free from fear. A future of infinite possibilities.

But I can’t. The vision just won’t come. Because my world as it is feels more than good enough.

And yet. What I keep returning to is this: how it could possibly be right, to ask Josh not to take a pill that could save his life?

Overcome by emotion, I lean over to kiss him. His lips are tangy with vinegar. If you took it and I didn’t, I want to plead, when would you think we should stop doing this? When I’m fifty? Sixty? Seventy?

We move apart and he takes my hand, this man I have never not loved, who I trust so deeply, whose judgement I so rarely question.

‘I’m not trying to talk you into it, Rach, I promise. I still don’t know what I want to do myself. I just . . . think we shouldn’t dismiss it yet. I want this to be a decision we make together.’

 

Later, back at the B&B, Josh is sitting on the window seat, the sash raised. I can see stars shimmering, the bright marble of the moon. Sea is sighing against shingle.

‘If we took that pill,’ I say, ‘it would really complicate everything. Starting a family. We’d have to wait, wouldn’t we? Until we knew for sure if it had worked, and hadn’t harmed us. I mean, that would be the responsible thing to do, wouldn’t it?’

He looks back towards me, over his shoulder, dark and brooding. It reminds me of a million pictures I have taken of him. So photogenic, but eternally camera-shy.

But even as he nods, my subconscious is saying, No, the risk is too great; how do we know if pregnancy would even be an option? And, if it was, how safe would the baby be?

I climb off the bed, take a single step over to him. I’m desperate for comfort perhaps; I don’t know.

He puts his hands to my hips, then nudges up my T-shirt to expose the flesh of my midriff, dipping to kiss it once, twice. His breath is wet and warm against my skin.

‘I’m sorry, Rach. I wish I could just . . . not be afraid. I wish we didn’t have to think about any of this stuff.’

I lower my lips to his head, drop a kiss into his dark jumble of hair. ‘Then let’s not. Let’s stop talking, or thinking.’

With a nod, he pushes me silently back on to the bed, the mattress so tiny it can barely hold us both. The room is snug enough that we’ve been colliding with the furniture, and each other, the whole time we’ve been here. He eases down my shorts, and then my underwear, then his own. And soon he is inside me on a bed that rocks and creaks comically in a way that would ordinarily make us laugh, and perhaps relocate to the bathroom, or, failing that, the floor. But not tonight. Tonight, we make love as though there is something at stake. Breathless and urgent, as you might if you’d just been told an asteroid was on course to obliterate earth. As if it might be the last time ever.

13.

Josh

February 1989

The first time we ever talked about having kids of our own, we’d only been dating a couple of months. Rachel was staying with me at the house I still shared with Mum, who was away for the weekend with my aunt.

Rachel had risen early, sliding out of bed before I was even awake. She told me once she found it impossible to lie still once the day had begun. It was down to guilt, she thought, because her dad had always had to be up at dawn for work.

I paused in the kitchen doorway, as I always did on the mornings after she’d stayed over, watching her wholly absorbed in sketching, or cooking French toast, or warming milk to add to espresso. And I would imagine we were years in the future, that we were living together. Even that she was my wife.

If ever she looked up, I’d yawn and rub my face, as if I hadn’t been gazing at her for a couple of minutes already. I didn’t want to scare her. Hell, I was scaring myself. It had only been eight weeks, and already I was fantasising about spending my life with this girl.

That morning, Rachel was sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped up in my dressing gown, blonde hair spilling out over the collar. She’d made coffee, in the stovetop espresso pot my mum had been using since visiting Rome with my dad in the sixties.

It wasn’t yet light outside. Through the kitchen window I could still see stars, scattered like spilt diamonds across the vault of darkened sky.

Rachel was reading the latest draft of my novel, holding the printed pages delicately by their edges.

‘Why did you want him to be a father?’ she asked as I sat down next to her.

I leaned in to kiss her. ‘Hello. Who?’

‘The lead detective.’

Rachel had a knack for this – asking questions nobody else had thought to, not even Wilf, or my agent. She maintained she didn’t have any particular career ambitions, but I sometimes thought she might make a good journalist. She was the most curious person I’d ever met.

‘I guess he felt more real to me that way,’ I said.

‘But you don’t have kids.’

‘You don’t think he feels authentic?’

‘No . . . the opposite. He feels really convincing. I guess I’m surprised you can write so fluently about having kids without actually having had them.’

I smiled. ‘My mum gave me some pointers. And there are a fair few kids in my extended family.’

Several moments passed. Rachel sipped her coffee, and I thought again how beautiful she was. Those searching, doe-brown eyes. Her long hair a honeyed tumble against her freckled face. The soft slope of her bones. Cheeks slightly pink from the coffee, pale hands cradling her mug. I couldn’t believe how lucky I’d got, to have crossed paths with her mere moments before I left university for good.

‘Do you think you’ll want kids, one day?’ I asked her, as casually as I could, looking down at the table. But I suspected that, in reality, I was fooling no one.

She paused for a moment, even though I guessed she was unfazed by the direction in which the conversation seemed to be heading. The opposite, really. I’d already noticed that one of her very favourite things was getting to know people, understanding what made them tick. How good she was at listening. The most interested person I’d ever met. I loved that about her, and I sometimes wondered if it was because of her childhood. Because she’d spent so long with a mother she never really knew.

‘Yeah. I really want all that stuff. That’s the one part of my future that’s always been clear to me.’ She turned to look at me, brow crumpled in earnest, and tucked her hair shyly behind one ear. ‘Do you think that’s weird? After what my mum did?’

‘Not at all,’ I said softly. ‘Doesn’t it actually make perfect sense? That you want all the stuff you missed out on as a kid?’

I was speaking from experience. I knew how it felt to fantasise about the kind of life my peers had appeared to take for granted, growing up. How things that were normal – perhaps even boring – to them felt extraordinary to me. Two parents at school plays, sports days, birthdays. Daydreaming in the back seat of the car on long journeys, rather than sitting up front. A third person at home at night, the hum of conversation disguising the tick of the clock.

But Rachel understood all that. We understood each other.

I reached for her hand, rolled her fingers gently between mine. They felt a little cool, in the wintry chill of my mum’s tiled kitchen. ‘I want all that stuff too, you know. In the future. Some day, once I . . .’ But then I trailed off, not keen to muddy the moment with talk of my fated family tree, or what might happen if I were to have a son.

The sentiment was pure, though: I could see myself doing it all with her. The pull of a future together already felt magnetic to me. As natural as an ocean tide, a planet orbiting stars.

She tilted her head, as if something had just occurred to her. ‘I love that it doesn’t scare you, talking about this stuff.’

I leaned in to kiss her. ‘That’s because it’s you,’ I said.

14.

Josh

May 2000

Seven days after our break at the beach, I wake again in the early hours.

The bed sheets are wet with sweat. My left arm is fizzing with pins and needles. My heart is hammering harder than it ever has before. I can hear my pulse rushing between my ears.

I pull myself into a sitting position. Swing my legs off the mattress, perch on the edge of it. Try to steady my breathing.

It doesn’t work. I feel it building inside me, a low, cold whistle of panic.

Fuck. Is this it?

I leave the bedroom, head into the hall. Grip on to the dado rail with my fingertips like an old man in his nineties. Ironically enough.

The flat is silent and warm. Claustrophobically stuffy. It is a cloudy night, no moonlight.

You have nothing to worry about.

You’ve made it this far.

The deaths are just coincidence.

Every test under the sun shows how healthy you are.

Nothing works. Shockwaves of pain begin to spread through my chest, along with an unbelievable pressure, as though I’ve woken up beneath the rubble of a twenty-storey building.

I know I should call 999. But my overriding instinct is to speak to Rachel. She’s away overnight with work, but I just have to tell her I love her, one last time.

But then my breathing tightens again. I gasp with the pain, and the panic.

I have to do something.

I want to live. I don’t want to die alone, here in this flat without Rachel.

I don’t want to leave her.

I think of my dad, what he would have said. What my mum would say.

Do what you can, Josh. Whatever it takes.

That’s what they’d tell me. I am sure of it.

I can’t catch my breath. The air feels too thin to drink, as though the flat has been drained of oxygen.

If I didn’t before, I know now that I am dying. I am going the same way as every other man in my paternal bloodline.

I stagger back to the bedroom, tug open the drawer to my nightstand, grab the plastic bag containing the pills. Propelled now only by fear, the primal need to survive, I shake one into the palm of my hand.

For a millisecond I stare at it, stiff and white against my shining, sweat. . .