He Mocked the Voice I Ruined to Save Him novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Scan

My mother's clinic was on the ninth floor of a hospital, and the first thing she did was lock the door.

"I want to show you what is in there," she said. "You do not have to decide anything. I only want you to see."

She put a thin camera through my nose and down the back of my throat, and I gripped the arms of the chair.

On the monitor, two pale folds opened and closed.

One moved. The other barely did.

"That is the left side," my mother said. Her voice was gentle and exact. "The smoke burned it, and the tracheotomy scarred it. It is stiff. It does not meet the right one."

"Can you fix it?"

"I can try." She turned the monitor so I could see all of it. "If it goes well, your voice gets clearer and higher. If it goes badly, it gets thinner and breaks more easily. I would say six chances in ten of better, three of the same, and one of worse."

"And the scar?"

"The scar stays whatever we do."

I stared at the screen for a long time.

The scraped, low sound that people turned to look at was a stiff pale fold I had never seen before.

"I want to keep it," I said.

I had not planned to say it.

"For now," I added. "Maybe I will want it fixed one day. Not because someone laughed."

My mother switched off the monitor and pulled her chair close.

"Good," she said. "That is the right reason to wait."

She put her hand over mine on the armrest.

"I wrote to you every month for six years," she said. "I would like you to know that."

I looked up.

"I never got one letter," I said.

She did not move. Her face went very still, a surgeon's stillness, and then it changed.

"Not one?"

"Not one. I thought you did not want me."

"Gianna." She said my name quietly. "Salvatore told me you did not want to hear from me. He said you had asked him to send the letters back."

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