He sat somewhere beyond the locked doors, waiting.
I did not ask whether he had eaten.
I hated that a small part of me wondered.
Near midnight, when the hospital quieted into its strange after-hours rhythm, I woke to a soft knock.
Not the brisk tap of a nurse.
Not the confident knock of a doctor.
This one was hesitant.
Maya opened the door a few inches.
“Dr. Grant? There’s someone asking to speak with you.”
My mother woke instantly. “Absolutely not.”
Maya looked uncomfortable. “It’s Dr. Patel from Psychiatry.”
I frowned.
“Anil?”
Dr. Anil Patel had been my friend since residency. Gentle, observant, impossible to rush. He had once diagnosed a rare neurological reaction in a patient everyone else had dismissed as anxious because he noticed the man tapped his left fingers out of rhythm with his right.
He stepped inside carrying no chart.
That, too, told me this was not a normal consult.
“Amelia,” he said softly. “I’m sorry to come so late.”
My mother stood. “Why are you here?”
Anil looked at me, asking permission with his eyes.
I nodded.
He closed the door.
“I was contacted by a resident tonight,” he said. “Not Sophie. Another intern. Leah Morris.”
I recognized the name vaguely.
“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.
The name meant nothing to me.
But apparently it meant something to Cameron.
Because just beyond the door, in the hallway where he was not supposed to be, someone dropped a cup.
The sound cracked through the quiet.
A second later, Cameron’s voice came from the other side of the door, broken and unmistakably afraid.
“Where did you hear that name?”
END OF PART 2 – LIKE, SHARE AND COMMENT “THE ENTIRE STORY” IF YOU WANT TO READ THE FULL STORY
