She felt as if she were, quite literally, falling apart.

Last night when she’d fallen at dinner, she had jarred loose a tooth: the mandibular second molar. She visited her dentist twice a year, and her last exam, two months ago, had shown her teeth to be in excellent condition, the bones strong and not bearing a single cavity.

The molar lay on her desk, beside her laptop, atop a patch of plastic wrap. The tooth didn’t look healthy; it looked as if it had been extracted from an elderly individual suffering from poor dental health.

An examination of her remaining teeth revealed that many of them were decomposing, too. Her gums ached, and when she’d attempted to brush her teeth that morning, the pain and the quantity of blood leaking from her gums had forced her to put down the brush.

She’d also discovered more gray hair, but that wasn’t the worst of it. She had fresh wrinkles on her face and throat, and other parts of her body, more than she’d ever seen.

It was no longer feasible to ascribe her symptoms to stress, grief, or any emotional state. Something else was going on with her, something far more insidious.

She was aging. Rapidly.

At the current accelerated rate, she was frightened to imagine what sort of condition she might be in by the end of the week.

Maybe in a coffin . . .

Although she had visited her primary care physician yesterday, she didn’t have time to await blood work results. She needed answers immediately, or at least solid leads. The world of medicine often moved at a glacial pace, unless one was in an emergency room, and she didn’t believe she had the luxury of waiting.

A pillow propped against her lumbar region, her fingers plodded across the laptop’s keyboard. She wasn’t able to type nearly as fast and accurately as she would have liked. Although she had taken Celebrex to combat the joint inflammation that had been plaguing her, she was as clumsy as if she’d been typing while wearing a pair of thick gloves.

It was maddening.

As a licensed pediatrician, she had access to a number of online medical journals and databases. Standard medical practice was to use the differential diagnosis process to rule out the existence of various causes. In theory, by narrowing down possible explanations, you ultimately hit upon the truth. Her PCP had kicked off that process by ordering blood work to check out her hormone levels, antioxidants status, and immune system function.

Instead of methodically weeding out all the possible factors, she was searching directly for a diagnosis that fit.

She found one relatively early in her searching, didn’t want to believe it, looked in medical journals, found nothing satisfactory, and circled back to the original diagnosis.

Werner syndrome.