"Dr. Harding, what do I do? That family from the other day, the ones making all that noise about their mother dying, they put it online. That I gave her the wrong medication and killed her."

"Everyone online is trying to dox me now, and the family said they're bringing reporters to drag my name through the mud. What if I can never work as a doctor again?"

"Don't panic. You've got me. I won't let anything happen to you."

Sidney comforted Cecily, and when his gaze shifted to me, something in it hardened, like he'd made up his mind.

"Sheila, when the reporters get here, you tell them the medication error was yours. That none of it had anything to do with Cecily."

"You're her supervising physician, after all. This is on you either way for not doing your job and reviewing her work. You should be the one answering for it."

I stared at him, unable to believe it. "Sidney, have you lost your mind?"

"You know that the second I own this, my whole career is finished!"

He clicked his tongue, impatient.

"So you'd rather ruin a young girl's entire life out of your own selfishness?"

"Cecily isn't like you. She's still so young. Her career in medicine hasn't even started."

"Even if you lose this job, worst case you've still got me to provide for you. What more could you possibly want?"

I stepped back without thinking, and the man in front of me slowly blurred into the eighteen-year-old face I used to know.

The day we filed our college applications, Sidney and I both hit confirm on the same major. Medicine.

His eyes were so bright back then. He held me tight and said that for the rest of his life he'd climb to the top of medicine hand in hand with me, that we'd become the couple everyone in the field envied.

In school I wasn't as smart or as gifted as he was, and I fell behind on the dense, difficult material more than once.

He spent every hour outside class organizing my notes and tutoring me, night after night.

Countless top hospitals came after him, and his one condition was always that they had to take me too.

The man who'd once been so certain he'd never leave me behind. How had he turned into someone I couldn't recognize anymore?

My eyes focused back on the Sidney standing here now, and I shook my head.

"No. I won't agree to it."

Sidney, I'm begging you. Don't turn what's left of our happy memories into hatred.

But he was out of patience for persuasion.

A wave of noise came closer. The family had arrived, with a TV crew.

"You quack, give me back my mother's life!"

Before I could react, Sidney had already reached out and pushed me forward.

"Everyone, this accident was indeed my wife Sheila Simmons's momentary carelessness. She wrote the wrong prescription for the intern. As her husband, let me apologize to you all on her behalf first."

I denied it at once. "That's not true. I'm not the one who got the medication wrong!"

The family was frantic, several of them crowding in around me, refusing to hear a word of my defense.

"So it was you, you quack, who really killed my mother!"

"Your own husband came out and named you. Who else could it be?"

"You nearly had us blaming the wrong person. Today you're paying for my mother's life!"

Fists came down on me, hard, and I was beaten to the floor, curled in on myself.

In the middle of the despair I struggled to reach out. "Sidney... help... help me..."

But through the legs of the people hemming me in, all I could do was watch Sidney gather Cecily against him and stride away.

He never once looked back.

When I opened my eyes again, it was the familiar hospital ceiling.

Sidney sat at the edge of my bed, and when he saw me wake, he let out a breath.

"How are you feeling? I didn't think they'd get so worked up and start hitting you."

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.