If you ever touch my wife again, I will make sure you vanish from every medical registry in North America before sunrise.
I woke to the sterile scent of antiseptic and a steady drip in my arm. The rhythmic beeping of a cardiac monitor seemed to measure not just my pulse, but the lingering tremor in my chest. Sunlight, muted by heavy blinds, painted stripes across the pristine white sheets of a St. Jude Hospital VIP room.
Arthur sat by my bedside, his hand resting gently on my forehead. He looked tired, lines etched around his eyes.
“Nora, my love,” he murmured, his voice a soft rasp. “You gave us quite a scare.”
I pushed myself up, the IV tugging at my arm. “The man,” I started, my throat dry. “Julian. He attacked me.”
Arthur’s thumb brushed my temple, a soothing gesture that felt oddly disorienting.
“My dearest,” he said, pulling a medical chart from a holder at the foot of the bed. “The doctors and I have been concerned. Your blood pressure spiked dramatically. We’re seeing some… unusual brain activity on the scans.”
He held up a sheet, covered in dense medical jargon and jagged graphs I couldn’t comprehend. My gaze blurred over the numbers, trying to make sense of the clinical authority in his tone.
“It was a preeclampsia-induced hallucination, Nora,” he insisted, his eyes holding mine with such absolute certainty. “A severe episode.”
I remembered the cold asphalt against my back, the grip on my throat. The terror. It had been so real.
“No, Arthur, it wasn’t,” I tried to protest, but my voice felt weak, unconvincing even to myself.
He reached for a tablet from the nightstand, tapping the screen. “We reviewed the security footage. Look.”
He angled the tablet towards me. The grainy black and white video showed me sitting at the café table, then Julian Pryce approaching. He gestured, spoke, but there was no lunge, no grab. He simply… walked away.
“He asked for directions, Nora,” Arthur said, his voice laced with concern. “You must have been disoriented. The preeclampsia can be very deceptive.”
My breath caught in my chest. The memory of the attack, so vivid moments ago, seemed to waver, blurred by the clinical evidence in front of me. Had my mind truly created such a horrifying fiction? The weight of Arthur’s absolute medical authority pressed down, suffocating me with doubt.
I closed my eyes, a single tear tracing a path down my cheek. The terror of the stranger faded, replaced by the chilling fear that my own mind was betraying me.
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