Not the neurologist Mauricio has been parading through the house the last few months. Your actual physician, Dr. Treviño, a hard-faced woman from Cumbres who has known your blood pressure since you were thirty and your bad habits since you were twenty-five. She comes in angry enough to strip paint.
“Who changed his muscle relaxants?” she asks before even greeting the room.
Rosa looks at Carmen. Carmen looks at you.
You don’t answer right away because the question lands on top of too many others all at once. Over the last six months, your body has not merely plateaued. It has receded. Your mornings have gotten foggier. Your speech, when it came in fragments at night, vanished completely after afternoon doses. You assumed that was failure—your body punishing you for refusing enough therapy, for hating dependence too much to work with it properly.
Now you wonder if some of that helplessness was purchased for you.
Dr. Treviño holds up two pill bottles.
“These are not what I prescribed.”
The room changes temperature.
Carmen presses her lips together hard enough that you know she’s trying not to speak out of turn. Rosa goes pale. You feel your pulse beginning to hammer again, not from physical strain now but from the simple, monstrous implication of it.
Someone wanted you quieter than illness required.
Treviño explains fast, furious, and clinical. The dosage is wrong. Not poison. Something almost worse. The right kind of medication given in the wrong concentration and frequency, enough to increase lethargy, reduce motor responsiveness, and cloud cognitive testing without leaving obvious bruises. Enough to make a half-paralyzed man look almost completely gone.
You close your eyes.
