The door closed.
I listened to their footsteps disappear.
Then I began counting.
One.
Two.
Three.
At eighty-five, the door opened again.
Dr. Priyanka Oay, chief of transplant surgery, stepped inside wearing navy scrubs beneath her white coat.
She looked down the corridor.
Then she closed the door.
And locked it.
The brass deadbolt landed with a heavy click.
She turned toward me.
“You can sit up now.”
I raised the hospital bed.
“My husband?”
“Elevator reached the ground floor thirty seconds ago.”
“Marisol?”
“With him.”
Dr. Oay reached into her coat and removed a thin black tablet.
For the first time since I had awakened after surgery, my heart started racing.
She pulled the visitor’s chair beside my bed.
“Are you ready?”
“I’ve been ready since yesterday morning.”
Her expression was grave.
“Good.”
She unlocked the tablet.
“Because your husband just walked out of this hospital believing he pulled off the con of the decade.”
She turned the screen toward me.
“And when he realizes what is waiting for him upstairs, Coraly, he is going to lose his mind.”
Four years earlier, I thought meeting Thaddius Bromel had been an accident.
That was the first lie.
My mother had died when I was twenty-six.
