“Emotional vulnerability is always harder than physical danger, Marlowe. That’s just science.”
I opened one eye and looked at her. She was smiling. I wanted to argue, but she was right, and we both knew it.
“While we wait,” Sable said, her tone shifting, “who was that guy? Sterling? You’ve mentioned him before but never-“
“I know.” I took a breath. “There’s a lot I haven’t told you. About Sterling, about my past, about why I am the way I am. You deserve to know all of it, and I’m going to tell you. I promise.”
Before I could say another word, the door to the examination room opened, and a doctor stepped into the hallway. Not Dorian – a different doctor, younger, holding a clipboard with the particular gravity of a man about to deliver news that would change something.
“Mrs. Marlowe?”
My heart stopped. Not figuratively – I could feel the muscle stall, miss a beat, recalibrate.
“Yes?”
“We’ve completed the preliminary tests on your brother.” He paused. The pause was the kind that exists not because the speaker needs time, but because the listener needs to prepare. “The blood loss, the vomiting, the respiratory distress – it wasn’t caused by his existing condition.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your brother was poisoned.”
The word detonated in the hallway like a grenade.
Poisoned.
Not sick. Not declining. Not the cancer doing what cancer does. Someone had put something into my brother’s body – deliberately, intentionally, with the knowledge that it could kill him – and walked away.
The hallway tilted. Or I tilted. One of us was no longer level.
“Poisoned,” I repeated. The word tasted like metal.
“A highly toxic compound,” the doctor continued, his voice clinical and careful. “Potentially lethal within an hour. How he survived long enough for you to find him is… remarkable.”
Remarkable. He used the word remarkable the way doctors use it – not as a compliment, but as a confession that science didn’t have a better explanation.
Sable’s hand found my arm. Gripped it. Her fingers were cold.
And in the space between one breath and the next, the question formed – not gradually, but all at once, fully assembled, terrifying in its completeness:
Who did this?
The hallway had turned into something underwater. Sounds arrived muffled and slow – the beeping of machines, a nurse’s voice somewhere distant, Sable saying my name. I could feel her hand on my arm, could feel my own heartbeat in my throat, my wrists, the backs of my knees. My body was telling me things my mind hadn’t caught up with yet.
Poisoned.
Rowan was poisoned.
Not by disease. Not by the cancer that had been eating him from the inside like a slow fire. By someone. A person with hands and intention and access to a substance that could kill a man in under an hour. Someone had looked at my brother – my quiet, generous, self-sacrificing brother who’d paid a stranger’s exam fees and worked layaway shifts for a birthday dress and raised his little sister after their parents died – and decided he should stop being alive.
“Can I see him?” My voice came from very far away.
The doctor studied me with the calibrated sympathy of a man who’d delivered this kind of news before and understood that the request to see the patient was, in fact, a request to confirm that reality hadn’t completely come apart.
“Yes. But his condition is fragile – the poison damaged his respiratory system, which was already compromised. Keep the conversation calm. Don’t agitate his breathing.”
I nodded. My body moved toward the door. My mind was still in the hallway, processing the word poisoned, turning it over and over the way you turn a stone you’ve found in a field, looking for the seam, the crack, the explanation for how something so terrible could be so smooth.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.