“She was scared,” Anil continued. “She asked whether conversations with me could be confidential if no patient was involved. I told her I could not promise confidentiality if someone was in danger. She almost hung up.”
My pulse quickened.
“What did she say?”
“She said Sophie had been telling people you were unstable.”
My mother made a soft sound of disgust.
Anil continued, “Not publicly. Quietly. Carefully. A comment here, a concern there. She told two residents she had seen you crying in a stairwell last week. She told another that you seemed fixated on her relationship with Cameron.”
“I haven’t cried in a stairwell since my second year of residency.”
Anil gave a small, sad smile. “That does sound unlike you.”
“What else?”
He hesitated.
My mother noticed. “Say it.”
Anil looked at me. “Leah said Sophie had access to someone’s old phone.”
I frowned. “Whose?”
“She didn’t know. She said Sophie bragged that people believe screenshots more than memories.”
The room seemed to tilt.
Screenshots.
Messages from my number.
Cameron’s fear.
The false story built piece by piece before I ever went into labor.
“This was planned,” I said.
The words barely made a sound.
Anil’s expression darkened. “It may have been.”
“But why?”
He reached into his coat pocket and removed a folded sheet of paper.
“Leah slid this under my office door after she called. She was too afraid to bring it herself.”
He handed it to me.
My fingers shook as I unfolded it.
It was a photocopy of a photograph.
Grainy. Slightly crooked.
A younger Sophie stood outside what looked like a courthouse, hair shorter, face softer, one arm linked through that of an older woman whose features tugged at something in my memory.
Not because I knew her.
Because I knew the man standing beside her.
Cameron.
Younger by perhaps six or seven years.
No wedding ring.
No white coat.
Just Cameron, looking directly at the camera with one hand resting lightly on Sophie’s shoulder.
I stared until the image blurred.
My mother leaned closer, then went very still.
“Amelia,” she said slowly, “turn it over.”
I flipped the paper.
On the back, someone had written a single sentence.
Ask Cameron what happened to Grace.
The room was silent except for the monitor beside my bed.
Grace.
