What Colette Found
Chapter 02 - What Colette Found
Julian called for an ambulance before he called for anything else, Oliver's arm carefully immobilized again with a fresh temporary splint the paramedics brought, the small silver capsule and needle preserved exactly as Colette had found them, sealed in a sterile bag one of the responding EMTs provided without needing to be asked twice why it mattered.
"I want that capsule analyzed," Julian told the lead paramedic, his voice still unsteady. "Immediately. I don't care what it costs or who I need to call to make that happen tonight."
Lauren, seated now in the hallway outside Oliver's room under Colette's watchful, unyielding supervision, had recovered some measure of her earlier composure, though the specific rigidity in her shoulders told a story her words weren't yet willing to confirm.
"I don't know anything about that capsule," she said, when Julian finally returned to question her directly. "I've never seen it before in my life."
"Someone put it inside his cast," Julian said. "Deliberately. Hidden against his skin, positioned exactly where his wrist would rest. That's not an accident, Lauren. That's not something that happens by chance."
"I don't know what you're implying," Lauren said, "but I resent it considerably."
Colette, standing nearby, said nothing, though her expression carried a specific, unshakeable certainty that Julian found himself trusting more than his own wife's protests.
Oliver, sedated lightly for the ambulance ride and the reset his arm would require at the hospital, slept fitfully in his father's arms during the drive, small and pale and exhausted from months, Julian now understood with a growing horror, of something considerably worse than a simple broken bone.
"How long has he been unwell," the emergency room physician asked, once they'd arrived, reviewing Oliver's chart with a careful frown. "Beyond tonight's incident. I'm seeing several visits over the past four months for fatigue, low-grade fevers, unexplained bruising."
"Since the cast went on," Julian said slowly, the timeline finally, fully assembling itself in his mind. "He broke his arm falling from his pony four months ago. He's been sick, on and off, ever since. We assumed it was simply a difficult recovery."
"I'd like the capsule's contents analyzed as quickly as possible," the physician said. "If there's a substance being introduced through that mechanism, it would explain a considerable amount about his recent symptoms that we haven't otherwise been able to account for."
Julian sat in the emergency room's family waiting area that night, Oliver finally stable and resting in a monitored room down the hall, and allowed himself, for the first time since Colette had pried that cast open, to feel the full weight of what four months of unexplained illness had actually meant.
May you like
*Someone has been slowly poisoning my son,* he thought, *for four months, through a device hidden inside his own cast, while I praised his stepmother for being so attentive to his recovery.*
He thought of Lauren, sitting in the hallway outside Oliver's bedroom, insisting she knew nothing, and felt something in his chest go entirely, permanently cold.
