Chapter 3: At the Glass
Dr. Reed turned the screen toward me.
Aaron stood outside the glass entrance doors wearing his white coat. His hair remained perfectly neat, but his breathing looked much too rapid. Sylvia stood beside him wearing pearl earrings and a soft cardigan.
In her hand was the same silver cup she carried into my bedroom every morning.
Aaron lifted his fist and pounded against the glass.
“Anna! Open the door!”
I flinched so suddenly that the paper beneath me tore.
Sylvia did not knock. She simply raised the cup a little higher, almost as though she were presenting a gift.
Dr. Reed stepped closer to the security monitor.
“Zoom in,” she told the nurse.
The nurse adjusted the controls.
Dr. Reed enlarged the image, and the silver cup slowly tipped toward the camera. For a fraction of a second the liquid inside caught the light—darker than water, slightly viscous, the same shade I had swallowed every morning for months without questioning the taste.
My stomach turned.
Aaron pounded again, harder. His voice carried through the intercom when the nurse activated it by mistake for half a second.
“Anna, I know you’re in there. Open the door. You’re scaring yourself for no reason. Come home.”
Sylvia remained still beside him, the cup held at chest height, her expression serene in the way that had always made disagreement feel like a personal failing.
Dr. Reed switched the intercom off.
She looked at me, then at the locked transport case containing the samples, then back at the monitor.
“This clinic does not open its doors to anyone without patient consent,” she said quietly. “And right now, Mrs. Mitchell, you are the patient.”
I stared at the image of my husband and my mother-in-law standing on the other side of the glass. The white coat. The pearl earrings. The silver cup. The same objects that had framed my days for so long suddenly looked like evidence rather than care.
My son moved again, a strong roll beneath my ribs.
I placed both hands over him and did not look away from the screen.
“Don’t let them in,” I said.
Dr. Reed nodded once.
May you like
Outside, Aaron raised his fist and struck the glass a third time.
The sound reached us as a dull, insistent thud—the same word he had always used, protection, translated into force against a door that, for the first time, was not under his control.
