Chapter Eight
Dr. Parks called me in to go through Bill’s records side by side with mine, and she’d cleared a whole hour for it, which should’ve warned me about how bad it was going to be.
Beatrice had gotten the complete file through proper channels, a formal records request in my name, which I was entitled to make, and which Bill’s office couldn’t refuse without setting off alarms. His office had taken its time and then sent everything, because refusing would look worse, and because Bill still believed he was writing fiction for an audience of one trusting woman.
Parks laid the pages out across her desk in two rows. His on top, hers below.
“I want to show you this the way I’d show a colleague,” she said, “because you’re the one who lived it, and you deserve to see the truth. Tell me if I go too fast.”
“Okay.”
“All right. Here’s a panel from his office.
Look at this line.” She tapped a row of numbers.
“Your hemoglobin. His report has it sitting at the low edge of normal. Now here’s my lab, recently.
You’re anemic, clearly, measurably. Anemia like yours doesn’t appear overnight, and it doesn’t hide.
If his number was real, my number shouldn’t be possible on this timeline. One of these documents is wrong.”
“Maybe I got worse after his test.”
“Maybe. Hold that thought, because you’re doing the work his defense lawyer will do, and it’s good practice.
” She moved down the row. “Now his liver values. Normal, normal, normal, every draw. Mine, elevated. Again, possible to explain once. Here’s what’s harder to explain.
” She pulled a third page from the row. “This is the summary he gave you after your worst stretch, when you reported the numbness and the burning feet. He documents your complaint, in his own words: patient reports paresthesia, consistent with anxiety and exhaustion. And then, nothing. No nerve conduction referral. No B12 workup. No heavy metal screen, which any first-year resident would order for a patient with progressive neuropathy, hair loss, and GI symptoms. A patient presents with a textbook list, and this physician’s response, on paper, in his own file, is a note about stress and a recommendation for rest and supplements. ”
“The supplements,” I said.
“His file recommends continuing them. By name. Twice.” She let me sit with that, then pulled one more page.
“And here’s the detail Beatrice liked best. Billing records.
His office billed for a comprehensive metabolic panel and a full blood count at your spring visit.
If those tests ran, results exist somewhere, and the results in your patient file are one-line summaries with no laboratory attached.
No lab name, no reference ranges, no report numbers.
I’ve read thousands of files, Mrs. Barber.
Real results arrive machine-formatted, stamped by the lab that ran them. These were typed in Word or something.”
“Typed by him.”
“Typed by someone in that office with access to your chart. That’s for investigators to pin down.
What I can say medically is this: there are three possibilities, and I’ll give you all three, because my job is honesty, and Beatrice’s job is proving which one it is.
One, he’s incompetent to a degree that’s hard to credit at his level.
Two, he ran the right tests, got alarming results, and reported them to you as normal, which means somewhere real numbers may exist. Or three, he never ran what he billed for, and the file is a costume.
My money, unofficially, is on some blend of the last two.
His paperwork isn’t sloppy. It’s careful.
Everything a worried, trusting patient would need to hear is in here, and everything a competent doctor would actually do is not. ”
I looked at the two rows of paper, his fiction on top, my body’s truth underneath, and I felt cold and shuddered.
“He examined me,” I said. “He put his hands on my hands and tested my grip, the way you did. He watched my strength fail and he wrote anxiety. And Dara sat right there in the room, holding my purse, helping me remember my symptoms so I wouldn’t downplay.
” I heard it as I said it. “That’s not what she was doing.
She was auditing. She sat in on my appointments to hear exactly which symptoms I’d noticed, so she’d know how careful to be.
And I squeezed her hand and thanked her, because I felt so lucky my best friend came to my appointments. ”
Parks didn’t try to soften it. “Most poisoners have to guess what the victim’s doctor knows. Yours had a transcript.”
“She didn’t just betray me and hire him.
She built a wall out of her own brother and stood me in front of it.
Every road out went through the two of them.
The friend heard everything, the doctor explained everything, and between them there was no crack for the truth to get through.
” I sat back. “Except a camera I forgot to turn off.”
“Except that,” Parks said. “Systems like theirs fail on small things. In my experience, they always fail eventually, but I’ll grant that yours failed unusually well.”
***
Nick took me to dinner that night, at the hotel restaurant, our table, and I told him about the two rows of paper. He listened the way he listened, all the way through, without arranging his reaction in advance.
“Beatrice must be pleased,” he said. “In her own way.”
“She said the medical file went from a shield of theirs to a sword of ours, and then she billed the metaphor to my account.” That got a laugh out of him, a real one, and the sound of it changed the evening. “Can I ask you a question that isn’t about the case or the movie?”
“Those exist?”
“Barely.” I turned my fork over. “Your niece. What’s she like now?”
“Sixteen. Terrifying. Debates competitively, which means family dinners are depositions.” He smiled at his plate.
“She doesn’t know I’m making the movie of her favorite book yet.
My brother wanted to tell her and I made him swear.
When we lock the cast, I’m going to fly her out and let her sit in on a recording session.
I’ve been planning the look on her face for about a year. ”
“You’ve cast her reaction before the movie.”
“It’s the only piece of casting the studio can’t touch.” He looked up. “Why that question?”
“Because you plan good things for people in secret,” I said. “I’ve spent weeks learning what my people planned for me in secret, and I wanted to see the other side of the same coin. I’d forgotten about it.”
He didn’t have a quick answer to that, and he didn’t manufacture one.
We let the quiet sit with us. The work talk was done, and neither of us reached for more of it.
The garden lights had come on. I’d eaten a full meal again, and my hands hadn’t tingled in days.
Across the table sat the man who’d believed me from the first minute, and I let myself look at him for a second longer than the conversation required.
He walked me back along the garden path.
We’d done this walk after every dinner, and it had a shape by now, an easy pace, gravel sounds, the turn where he always stopped, said something small, and left.
Except this time, the something small didn’t come, and we stood at the turn in the path, jasmine everywhere.
Nick looked down at me, I looked up at him, and the honest truth was that I moved first. Half a step.
His hand came up, careful, and touched my jaw.
I could feel how much he was holding back inside that carefulness, and I wanted, for one clean moment, to be nothing but a woman on a garden path with a man who was good.
But I stepped back. His hand dropped instantly, no resistance in it at all, and that made it worse and better at the same time.
“I can’t,” I said. “Nick, I want to be clear about what this is and isn’t.
It isn’t no. It’s not yet, and it’s not like this.
I’m still married to a man who’s under investigation for trying to kill me, which is a sentence I’d like removed from my life before I start anything.
I’m still sick. There’s still poison leaving my body.
They measured it. I don’t want the first time you kiss me to have Karl’s fingerprints anywhere on it.
When I come to you, and I’m saying when, I want to come whole, on my own two feet. As Millie, not as a rescue.”
Nick put his hands in his pockets, and he nodded slowly. When he spoke, there was no wound in his voice.
“Understood,” he said. “For the record, I wasn’t offering a rescue. I was standing on a garden path with the most remarkable woman I know, and the jasmine got the better of me. It won’t get the better of me again until invited.” He tilted his head. “You’ll notice I’m not apologizing.”
“I noticed.”
“Because I’m not sorry about the fact of it. Only the timing. Goodnight, Millie.”
He left the way he always left, unhurried, and I stood on the path until I couldn’t hear the gravel anymore, still feeling his hand on my jaw, and thinking that I’d just done the strongest thing I’d done all month.
My phone rang while I was still standing there. Karl.
I looked at the screen through three rings and built my tired voice before I answered.
“Hey. I was about to call. I lost track of the day.”
“There she is.” Warm. Sweet. Husband-of-the-year warm. “You missed Bill’s check-in. His office called me when you didn’t confirm. Millie, that’s the second time.”
“Oh, no, was that this week?” I started walking toward my suite, phone at my ear, watching my own shadow slide along the garden wall. “Karl, I’m so sorry, I’ve been buried. The color scripts are due, and the studio moved a meeting up, and it all just fell out of my head.”
“He can see you at the hotel. He offered. He’ll drive out with his bag like it’s a house call, very discreet, the front desk already knows to expect him.”
“No,” I said, and then rounded it off fast, soft, apologetic.
“I mean, that’s so kind, but honestly there’s nothing to see.
I’m fine, sweetheart. Truly. I’m sleeping, I’m eating, I’m taking everything Dara packed.
I just need to finish this work first, and then I’ll come home, and Bill can have me for a whole afternoon and run every test he likes.
” I made myself laugh a little. “Tell him I promise to be a good patient.”
The pause on the line lasted one beat too long.
“Of course,” Karl said. “Finish your work. That’s what you’re there for, after all.”
We said our goodnights, and I stood outside the door with the key card in my hand, replaying the shape of that pause.
Not hurt. Not worry. Calculation. Somewhere in that call, between the offer of a house call and my third gentle no, my husband had stopped hearing a tired wife and started hearing a delay.
I texted the whole exchange to Beatrice from memory before I even turned on the lights, and her reply came back short.
Noted. He’s done waiting for you to come to him. Which means soon he will come to you. Sleep well. We’re nearly there.