Chapter Akyl
Akyl
The consultation happens on Monday as promised. Dr. Asante arranged it with a surgeon named Elliot Marsh, who, according to Asante, is considered the foremost authority on excision surgery for complex endometriosis in the US.
I drive Katriona myself. She sits in the passenger seat of my car, her hands folded in her lap, her posture that careful, controlled stillness I've come to recognize as her default setting.
She's wearing a dark jumper and trousers that are slightly too large for her.
Her hair is pulled into a low knot at the base of her neck.
"You didn't have to come," she says, looking out the window.
I don’t respond. I don’t know how to tell her that in just thirty-six hours I’ve come to crave to be near her.
I spent yesterday showing her around the house and spending time with her.
Getting to know her on a deeper level and answering her questions.
When the pain grew to be too much, I helped her upstairs and got her settled with a heat pad and a movie.
When she fell asleep against my shoulder, lightly snoring, that’s when I felt something inside me change.
All the rage at the lack of help she has received is still there, but it got pushed aside by the urge to protect her. To provide for her. Not just the medical stuff, but everything.
Her quiet strength, the way she hasn’t given up despite years of pain… that’s the woman I want beside me. Raising my family.
Marsh is thorough. The consultation takes two hours. I wait outside in a corridor that smells of antiseptic and over perfumed Pot Pourri.
I think about the doctor who abused his position with her, and likely many other desperate women. Richard Hale.
I have already instructed my people to investigate Hale. Information already dribbling through, building a picture of a life I can’t wait to tear apart.
Katriona emerges from the consultation room. Her eyes are bright, too bright, and her jaw is set in the way that tells me she is holding something enormous inside her chest and refusing to let it out.
"He can do it," she says. "The surgery. He said the damage is significant but he's confident he can excise the worst of it. He wants to operate as soon as possible."
"Good."
"The cost is eighty-two thousand. More than I was originally quoted, because the condition has progressed."
"The cost is immaterial. Whatever you need."
She stops walking and I turn to face her beneath the fluorescent lighting that makes everything look clinical and exposed. I see the exact moment when the gratitude and the anger and the hope collide inside her.
“I need you to know I’m grateful,” she says, pausing to press and rubs her lips together like she is blending lipstick.
A tell I’ve learned when she needs more time to figure out her next words.
“But I’m angry too. Not at you,” she adds quickly.
“At the fact that I’ve had to live with this for so long, until the point where I convinced myself I must be crazy but no one believed me about the pain…
and I’m so angry.” The last words come out as a whisper.
The silence in the corridor is total. I want to pull her into me and let her scream into my shoulder. I want to take all her rage and add it to mine. Instead, I reach for her hand and weave her fingers between mine.
"You learned to survive without being cared for," I say. "I am still deciding how much of the world should suffer for that."
She stares at me.
"We should go," I say. "There are preparations to make."
I walk toward the car, and after a moment I hear her footsteps behind me. I open the passenger door for her and wait for her to get in. Just as she is about to fold into the car, she stops, straightens, and stands right in front of me, with only the car door between us.
"That thing you said,” she says, “About the world suffering."
"Yes."
"You meant it?"
I look at the flecks of silver-gray in her irises.
"I have never said something I didn't mean."
She lifts one hand from the top of the car door and brings it to the side of my face, searching my eyes with hers.
Then she brings her lips lightly to mine, barely a touch, leaves them there for a moment.
The urge to press forward is enough to knock me sideways.
But I don’t, I let her lead, and just as I’m about to give in to the desire, she pulls back.
The air compresses around me at the sudden lack of contact.
“Thank you,” she says. Only this time, it isn’t anger or gratitude I see in her expression, it’s something entirely more dangerous.
***
It's three in the morning and I’m sitting at the desk in my study with a glass of vodka I haven't touched and a file I've read four times.
Dr. Richard Samuel Hale.
Forty-three years old. MBBS, MRCOG, FRCOG.
Clinical lead at a private practice that turns over three-hundred-and-seventy million dollars a year.
Eleven years in post. His reputation is impeccable, referrals are excellent and patient reviews are enthusiastic.
He has several awards, including a healthcare innovation commendation from a charity gala where he almost certainly sat at the top table and smiled for photographs and shook the hands of people who are only going to make him richer.
I turn the page.
Patient complaints: three. All filed within the last eight years.
All involving women. All dismissed at the preliminary review stage due to insufficient evidence, the medical council's language for we chose not to look closely enough.
Two of the women withdrew their complaints.
The third pursued hers for fourteen months before disappearing from the record.
I have a separate note on where she is now, who she hired, and what it cost her.
I turn another page.
Financial interests: a private investment in a pharmaceutical company that manufactures the pain management medication he most commonly prescribes off-label. A consulting fee from a medical device company whose products he recommends at a statistically improbable rate.
Nothing individually that would destroy him. Everything, assembled into the right format and delivered to the right people, that absolutely will.
I close the file.
Katriona kept his name. She said it with the tone of someone who was keeping score.
I am going to finish what she started.
I pick up my phone.
Mirko answers on the second ring, despite the hour, because instruction went out two days ago with a priority marker Mirko knows means everything else stops.
"Begin tonight,” I say simply. “I want the submissions drafted before morning. The journalist contact happens tomorrow evening, after the surgery, when I know Katriona is stable and I have the bandwidth to finalize the language."
"Do you want him to know it's coming?"
I consider this. There is a version of this that includes a conversation with Hale. A moment in which he understands exactly who is dismantling him and why, the way men like him are always faintly surprised to discover that women in pain sometimes have people in their corner.
I decide against it. He doesn't deserve to know her name is in this. He doesn't get to have that. I don’t want him to have even a second to prepare for what’s about to happen to him.
"No," I say, knowing that by the end of tomorrow, Katriona will be out of surgery and Richard Hale will be reduced to nothing.
Mirko ends the call.