The surgery went smoothly.
When Mona Larson was wheeled into recovery, her face was pale, her breathing steady.
A nurse stayed beside her, taking her blood pressure on schedule.
Lowell glanced at the chart, then left for his next case.
He walked out fast.
In my last life, he'd left at exactly this time too.
But afterward, Mona said he'd stayed by her side the whole time.
She said when she woke, the lights were harsh, her head was swimming, and there was one man standing by her bed. Just him.
People online cut those few sentences into countless short clips.
Under every one of them, someone was calling him scum.
This time, I stood outside the recovery room. I didn't go in.
I watched the on-duty nurse tuck the blanket around Mona, watched the ID band on her wrist, watched her eyelids flutter once.
Ten minutes later, Mona woke.
The first thing she said was:
"Where's Dr. Delgado?"
"Dr. Delgado went to his next surgery."
Mona closed her eyes for a moment.
"He didn't wait for me to wake up?"
The nurse gave a small smile.
"Doctors work on a schedule. They don't sit alone with a single patient."
Mona said nothing.
She turned her face toward the recovery room doorway.
Out there was the corridor, a camera, and nurses coming and going.
She seemed disappointed.
After a while, she suddenly lifted a hand to her own neck.
The nurse asked her:
"Does something hurt?"
Mona's eyes went red at once.
"It hurts."
The nurse checked immediately.
"There's a little redness here. Is it from your necklace pressing before the surgery? Don't scratch it, I'll get a doctor to look."
Mona didn't answer.
She grabbed the nurse's hand, her voice trembling.
"Before I woke up, did anyone come in?"
The nurse froze.
"No."
"I was right here the whole time."
Mona's tears spilled over.
"Really?"
The nurse's face changed too.
"Miss Larson, what are you trying to say?"
Mona didn't speak. She only cried.
It was exactly the kind of crying that makes people imagine the worst.
A few family members on visiting duty passed the doorway and stopped to look.
"What's wrong?"
Mona buried her face in the blanket.
The nurse quickly pulled the curtain.
Merlin rushed in, phone already up the second he came through the door.
"Mona, why are you crying?"
Mona shook her head.
The more she shook her head, the more frantic Merlin got.
"Don't be scared."
"Tell me."
"I'm here. Nobody can hurt you."
The nurse blocked him at once.
"No filming in recovery."
Merlin lowered the lens, but he didn't turn it off.
Mona clutched the blanket, her voice so small it seemed about to break.
"I don't know."
"When I woke up, it felt like someone had touched me."
The air went dead.
The nurse's face drained white.
I pushed the door open and walked in.
The moment Merlin saw me, he swung the phone toward me.
"Director Simmons, you're just in time."
"Mona says something wasn't right when she woke up."
"Doesn't your hospital owe us an explanation?"
Mona lifted her head to look at me, her eyes rimmed red.
"Ms. Simmons, I'm not trying to make a scene."
"But I'm a woman."
"I'm really scared."
In my last life, she'd said it the same way.
Never naming who. Never naming what was done. Only that she was scared.
And everyone else filled in the filthiest guess for her.
I asked the nurse:
"Who was in recovery just now?"
The nurse was so upset she was near tears.
"I was here, Nurse Lee was here too. No one had contact with her alone the entire time."
Merlin sneered.
"You all work for the hospital. Of course you speak for the hospital."
Mona shrank into the blanket, her shoulders shuddering.
Merlin crouched down at once.
"Mona, if someone wronged you, you can't just take it."
"You're a public figure. You have to protect yourself all the more."
I looked at him.
"You can't film here."
Merlin stood up.
"Director Simmons, right now the thing you care about most is that we can't film?"
"Not that a patient is saying she may have been assaulted?"
The crowd at the door grew.
Someone raised a phone.
Someone muttered:
"That's terrifying."
"You're out under anesthesia, you don't know a thing. If something really happened, you couldn't even fight back."
"I always said having a male doctor is a problem."
The hospital director arrived quickly.
He looked at Mona first, then at the phone in Merlin's hand, and there was already sweat on his forehead.
"Miss Larson, please, don't get upset."
"The hospital will absolutely investigate."
Merlin said:
"Investigate all you want, but the doctor involved has to be suspended first."
The director turned to me.
"Where's Lowell?"
"In the OR doing another surgery."
The director dropped his voice.
"Get him out here first."
"This can't wait."
"He's putting a patient under anesthesia."
"You want him to walk out right now?"
The director choked on it, his face ugly.
In that same stretch of time, Merlin had already posted the clip he'd cut.
The headline popped up fast:
【Influencer with Ten Million Followers Sobs on Waking: I Don't Know What Happened While I Was Under】
There was nothing solid in the video.
Only Mona's white face, her shaking voice, and me standing cold beside the bed.
The comments passed ten thousand in minutes.
【She's this scared and you still want proof?】
【The hospital's attitude is ice-cold.】
【Guess I was blind. The good-looking ones are the worst animals!】
【The male doctor has to come out and explain.】
【Somebody should look into this Dr. Delgado.】
I closed the page.
My fingers didn't shake.
In my last life, when I saw comments like these, I panicked completely.
I rushed to explain, rushed to clear things up, rushed to beg people to be reasonable.
The more I explained, the more it looked like guilt.
This time, I didn't say a word.
Once Mona finished crying, she was taken back to her room.
The director locked the department group chat and told everyone that no one was to speak to outsiders.
But Merlin stayed in the corridor, still posting videos.
At ten that night, the hospital's official account was overrun.
Lowell's name hit the local trending list.
At eleven, someone dug up our home address.
In the small hours, Lowell's mother called me.
Her voice was trembling.
"Evelyn, someone splashed red paint on the door."
"They're saying Lowell is an animal."
Lowell had just come out of surgery. He stood next to me, and the color drained from his face bit by bit.
Before I could say anything, my phone buzzed again.
It was a photo from an unknown number.
At the entrance to our daughter's school, someone had put up a sheet of paper.
On it was written:
【The animal's daughter should get out of the school.】
