He Counted My Lies Until I Died, Then Begged Me to Wake novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: What the Doctor Kept

Rhona's POV

I left St. Mary's on a Tuesday in a wheelchair, wearing my own beige coat.

I did not let Winslow carry it.

Dorinda took me to her apartment over the pharmacy and put me on her couch with a blanket and a bowl of soup.

She set my real stomach tablets and my heart pills on the table, each in the right bottle with the right label.

"Those are yours," she said. "I check them every morning, and so do you."

I swallowed one, and I tasted nothing but water.

A week later, the prosecutor sent a car.

The preliminary hearing for Sybil Holloway was held in a small room with wooden benches and one window.

I came in on Dorinda's arm with a cane.

Sybil was at the defense table in a gray cardigan, no pearls.

She looked smaller.

She did not look at me.

Winslow sat in the back row, alone, three seats from the aisle.

I had told him not to speak to me.

He had not.

I felt him there the way I used to feel him when I was a ghost, by a cold place along my shoulder.

The prosecutor stood.

"The state calls the family physician."

The gray-haired man in the camel coat came forward.

His hands shook on the rail.

"Doctor," the prosecutor said. "Two years ago, a patient's husband asked you to change her medication. Tell the court what you did."

"I replaced her stomach tablets with a sedative," the doctor said. "The husband asked me to. He said she was breaking down, and she wouldn't take anything for it. I agreed."

I kept my eyes on the wood of the rail.

"I was wrong," he said. "I'll lose my license, and I should."

"Did anyone else contact you about the prescription?"

"Mrs. Sybil Holloway."

The room made a small sound.

"When?"

"The first time was four months after I changed it. She phoned my office. She knew about the sedative. Her son's wife had been, in her words, difficult at dinner."

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