Was he surprised? No. He'd seen it. And for Cecily's sake, he chose not to.
At least the pain in my body had gone far enough to numb everything in my chest too.
I had no interest in dragging this out. I tucked the divorce papers into the shift schedule and handed the whole thing to him.
Sidney gave it one glance and picked up a pen. As he signed, he asked, in a tone that pretended to be offhand,
"By the way, that clinical study you've been doing on cardiovascular disease—the data's almost wrapped up, isn't it?"
"The girl needs a paper in a top journal to graduate. Just package up all the data from that project and send it to her."
Two years of my life, and Sidney's first request was that I hand it over to Cecily.
I looked at him without a word. He slid past my eyes.
"You won't have any use for it anymore. It'll just sit there going to waste."
"Better to give the work to someone who actually needs it—"
"Fine."
I agreed so easily that Sidney actually froze.
After a moment his face softened, and he reached out and patted my head.
"I knew you'd always be the reasonable one."
"Once this blows over, you can step down from the hospital while you're at it. Just focus on the home from now on. You've always wanted a baby, haven't you? I think it's about time."
A baby? Sidney, we did have one.
Except you killed it with your own hands.
He handed me the signed papers. His gaze moved over my hand, and something flickered across his face.
"Where's your wedding ring?"
I put the divorce papers away and answered without thinking about it. "Must have fallen off in the lobby earlier, in all the chaos."
Sidney made a small "Oh" and let it go.
My colleague Patricia happened to come in on her rounds.
She scolded me the way you scold someone you can't help caring about. "You know you had a miscarriage the day before yesterday. Your body's still weak. How could you not take better care of yourself?"
At that exact moment, a voice message from Cecily came through on Sidney's phone.
【Dr. Harding, I missed a step on my way downstairs just now and twisted my ankle, it hurts so much... can you take me home? sniff...】
Sidney grabbed his coat and was gone almost instantly.
So he didn't hear it.
I picked up my phone and booked a seat on the earliest evening flight.
As I walked out the hospital's front doors, an egg hit me square in the forehead.
The slime of it ran down my whole face.
A few worked-up people had been waiting for me, aiming their livestream cameras while they pelted me with rotten leaves and rotten eggs.
Sidney's Mercedes rolled past in front of me. Cecily was in the passenger seat, mouthing the words at me, taunting.
"You lost, you old hag~"
Back home, I washed myself clean and pulled out the luggage I'd packed long ago.
What Sidney didn't know was that my clinical project had already reached its final stage: polishing the paper.
The most prestigious international journal in the medical field was very interested in my research, and they had reserved this paper for publication a long time ago.
I sent the finished paper to the journal. Its official publication date fell exactly one day before Cecily's thesis defense.
Sidney wanted me to give her all the data, didn't he?
Then I'd hand over every last bit of it. I wanted to see whether she could carry the charge of data plagiarism when it came.
After I sent the zipped data file to Sidney, a voice message popped up on the screen.
I opened it. It was Cecily's bragging, the kind she couldn't hide.
"Thanks for the data, Sheila~ Dr. Harding's busy cooking for me at my place right now, no time to look at his phone, so I'm replying for him~"
Expressionless, I pressed block.
I wheeled my luggage out the door, got into the Uber, and headed for the airport, leaving this city and everything with Sidney behind me in the rearview mirror.
