Chapter 3 - The Ghost in the Family
"If you married her to protect her..." My voice cracked, raw and bleeding from the sheer weight of the betrayal. "Why did you keep me in the dark? Why let me spend the last three years thinking you fell in love with her? Why make me feel like an outsider in my own family?!"
Ben’s expression morphed from fury into an unbearable, soul-crushing grief. He reached out, his hand hovering near my cheek, before he let it drop back to his side, as if touching me were a crime punishable by death.
"Because Rosie begged me not to destroy your world," Ben said. "You adored your father, Clara. You went to law school because of him! You worked at the county prosecutor’s office to make him proud! Rosie looked at me with those pure, beautiful eyes and said, *‘Clara loves Daddy. If Clara knows Daddy is bad, Clara’s heart will break into a million pieces. Clara must never know.’* She sacrificed the truth to protect your peace!"
"And you let her?" I screamed, ignoring the sharp look from an orderly rolling a gurney past us. "You let her carry that alone?!"
"She wasn't alone! She had me!" Ben fired back, his voice rising in fierce defiance. "Every single day for three years, I tested every drop of water she drank! I bought groceries from three different stores across the county line! I installed security cameras with military-grade encryption around our house! We fought for her freedom, Clara! And when she started regaining her clarity, when the poison cleared from her system, she blossomed! You saw her! She was painting again! She was smiling again!"
"And the pregnancy?" I demanded, my chest heaving. "Ben... did you...?"
Ben looked directly into my eyes, unblinking, unabashed.
"We wanted a family," Ben stated with unwavering certainty. "Rosie wanted to be a mother more than anything on this earth. The doctors at the reproductive clinic ran tests—her heart was strong, her uterine lining was healthy. It was high risk, yes, but entirely viable. And when the ultrasound showed twins, she cried for three days straight out of sheer joy. She called them her little miracles."
"Then what happened three weeks ago?" I asked, looking back at the toxicology report clutched in my fist. "If you protected her so fiercely, how did this poison get into her blood?!"
Ben turned his head toward the end of the hall, staring at the elevator doors with venomous intensity.
"Three weeks ago, you had that big trial in Lansing," Ben said slowly. "You were stressed, working eighty-hour weeks. Your father called Rosie. He told her that he had stage-four pancreatic cancer. He claimed he had six months to live. He begged her to let him come over for dinner, to make amends before he died."
A cold dread pooled in my gut. "Dad... Dad has cancer?"
"No," Ben sneered, his lip curling in disgust. "I pulled his medical records through a private investigator yesterday. The bastard doesn't have cancer. He has a clean bill of health. But Rosie believed him. Because Rosie has a heart that cannot fathom cruelty. She invited him into our home while I was at the shop finishing an engine overhaul. She made him dinner."
"Oh God..."
"He brought her a gift, Clara," Ben whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying vibration. "A basket of organic, cold-pressed maternity juices from a boutique health market in Detroit. He told her it would give his grandchildren strong bones."
The paper in my hand crinkled as my fingers contracted into rigid claws.
"He dosed the juice," I whispered, the horror solidifying into a cold, immovable reality.
"The lab found traces of concentrated Difenacoum in the remaining bottles," Ben said. "It’s an odorless, tasteless anti-coagulant. It doesn't kill right away. It accumulates in the tissue, thinning the blood slowly, degrading the vascular lining until the placenta shears away from the uterine wall under the slightest pressure. He wanted an internal hemorrhage. He wanted it to look like a tragic, natural obstetric catastrophe inherent to high-risk Down syndrome pregnancies."
Before I could process the monstrous magnitude of what he was saying, the red emergency alarm above the surgical bay doors began to flash.
A high-pitched, piercing siren wailed through the corridor.
The double doors flew open violently, and a nurse in blue scrubs sprinted out toward the supply station, shouting frantically into her radio:
May you like
*"Code Blue! Operating Room 3! Patient is in DIC! Platelets are dropping below critical! We need eight units of O-negative and FFP stat! Call Dr. Thorne—the mother is arresting!"*
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