Chapter 4
My knee slammed into the steel doorframe as my balance betrayed me.
The loud metallic clang echoed down the sterile corridor like a gunshot.
Inside the room, Wyatt whipped around, his surgical scalpel catching the glare of the overhead lamp. Clara instantly lunged in front of the bedside monitors, her posture defensive, like an animal guarding a kill.
Wyatt’s eyes locked onto mine through the wired glass. The blood drained from his face until he looked like a corpse himself.
"Nora?" he breathed.
I pushed through the double doors, the air hitting my face freezing cold from the portable air filtration units buzzing in the corners.
"Nora, wait! Don't come in here—it's a sterile field!" Wyatt dropped the scalpel onto a metal tray with a sharp clatter and rushed toward me, hands held up in surrender. "How did you find this place? Who told you?"
"Evelyn Vance," I choked out, pointing a trembling finger toward the bed. "Evelyn Vance went missing in February. Her parents filed missing persons reports across three states. There were flyers taped to our grocery store windows, Wyatt! And she’s... she’s here? You kidnapped our daughter's teacher?"
"Nobody was kidnapped!" Clara snapped, stepping forward, her icy blue eyes narrowing with cold authority. "Keep your voice down, Mrs. Miller. You have no idea what you're interfering with."
"I asked my husband!" I shouted, the fury detonating in my chest. "Wyatt, talk to me! What did you do to her?!"
Wyatt reached to touch my shoulder, but I flinched violently away, slamming my back against the wall. He looked down at his shaking hands, tears spilling freely over his hollow cheeks.
"She didn't vanish, Nora," Wyatt whispered, his voice shattering into pieces. "She had a severe cerebral aneurysm eight months ago. She was brought into Saint Ambrose under an alias because she had no health insurance and no ID on her. I was the on-call neurosurgeon."
He swallowed hard, unable to meet my eyes.
"I made a mistake, Nora. A fatal error during the micro-vascular clipping. I nicked the anterior artery. She bled out on the table."
"You... you killed her?" My voice dropped to an incredulous whisper.
"She was declared clinically brain-dead," Clara intervened, her tone chillingly practical. "Wyatt signed the preliminary declaration of death. The Vance family was notified that she had passed away out of state. But right before the coroner arrived, Wyatt noticed anomalous autonomic activity. Her brainstem hadn't completely shut down."
"I couldn't let her die because of my arrogance," Wyatt sobbed, sinking to his knees on the cold tile, clasping his hands in front of his chest like a condemned man pleading for his soul. "Clara had access to an unapproved synthetic neural regenerative peptide from a clinical trial that was shut down by the FDA. If I admitted my surgical malpractice, I would lose my license, my career, everything we built for Maisie. But if we could wake her up... if we reversed the damage... I could fix what I broke."
I stared at the man I had loved for over a decade. He wasn't a monster; he was an arrogant god who couldn't accept his own fallibility.
"You faked her death," I whispered. "You stole experimental drugs. You moved her into an abandoned basement like an animal in a cage."
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"I saved her life!" Wyatt cried out, looking up at me with raw mania in his eyes.
"Then why," I asked, my voice deadly quiet as my gaze dropped to the nightstand next to Evelyn's bed, "is my daughter's pediatric medical chart sitting right next to her medication tray?"
