She came on the third day.
No syringe this time. Just herself, standing in the doorway in those pressed scrubs, her ponytail perfect, her hands loose at her sides. She looked like someone stopping by to drop off flowers.
'You're looking better,' she said.
I didn't answer. My ribs were still taped. The bruise above my eye had gone that deep, ugly yellow that means it's healing but hasn't forgiven you yet. I watched her cross the room and stop at the foot of my bed, and I kept my face very still.
'I wanted to tell you myself.' Her voice was soft. Almost kind. 'It felt right, coming from me.'
She touched her stomach. Just once, lightly. The gesture was practiced. Deliberate.
'I'm pregnant.'
The monitor beeped. Somewhere down the hall, a cart rattled past. The world kept moving at its regular pace, completely indifferent.
I said nothing.
'Dante is—' She paused, like she was searching for the right word. Savoring the search. 'He's over the moon. You know how he gets when he's excited about something. He's already talking about the nursery.'
She let that sit for a moment. Let me hold the full weight of it.
Then she smiled.
'He wants to name her Lily.'
The room went very quiet.
Not silent—the monitor still beeped, the ventilation still hummed—but quiet in the way a room goes quiet when something inside you stops. When a door closes that you didn't know was still open.
Lily.
We'd chosen it on a Tuesday night four years ago. Takeout containers on the coffee table, some documentary neither of us was watching. He'd said it half-joking and then looked at me and not been joking at all. I'd written it in my journal that night in small letters, like writing it too large might scare it away.
I had never told anyone. Not once. Not ever.
Scarlet was still smiling. She touched her stomach one more time—that same light, proprietary touch—and then she walked to the door.
'Rest well, Annalise,' she said.
The door clicked shut.
I lay there and stared at the ceiling and breathed. In. Out. In.
The name was in my journal. In my handwriting. In a drawer in our bedroom.
He had read it. Or he had told her. Or both.
I pressed my hand flat against my abdomen. Against the absence.
In. Out.
---
The next afternoon I found her in the main corridor on the second floor.
I shouldn't have been out of bed. My body knew it. Every step sent a dull throb through my taped ribs, and the fluorescent lights were too bright, and I was running on something that wasn't quite rage and wasn't quite grief—something rawer than both, something that had burned through every layer of restraint I had left.
She was talking to a resident near the procedure carts. Laughing at something he'd said, her badge catching the light. The senior attending badge that Dante's money had bought and her incompetence had disgraced.
She saw me coming.
Something shifted in her expression. Not fear. Calculation.
I reached the cart.
My hand found the scalpel before I'd made any conscious decision. It was just there, and then it was in my hand, and then I was moving.
I grabbed her arm. She pulled back but not fast enough. The blade was shallow, precise—a clean line across her forearm, the kind of cut that bleeds cleanly and hurts and does nothing permanent. A surgeon's cut. Controlled even in the breaking.
Scarlet screamed.
Not from pain. The sound was too immediate, too theatrical, pitched exactly right for the corridor, for the audience. She stumbled back against the wall and clutched her arm and screamed again, and every head in the hallway turned.
Security came fast. Two of them, then three, footsteps pounding from the far end of the hall.
I stood there.
Scalpel still in my hand. Blood on the blade. My ribs screaming. The lights too bright.
I didn't look away from her face.
She was crying now—perfect tears, perfectly timed—and pressing her sleeve against the cut, and looking at me with those wide eyes that said helpless, harmless, victim. She was very good at it. She'd had practice.
The security guards reached me. Hands on my arms. Someone said my name.
I let them take the scalpel.
I still didn't look away from her.
Because I wanted her to know that I saw it. All of it. The performance, the tears, the careful calculation behind those wide eyes. I wanted her to know that I was not confused, not broken, not the hysterical woman this corridor was already deciding I was.
I was a surgeon who had just made a very precise cut.
And I was not finished.
Scarlet held my gaze for one second. Then she looked away first.
That was enough.
