Chapter 3 - THE UNRAVELING OF ANDREW GRANT
By the end of the second week, my carefully constructed world was crumbling beneath the weight of quiet, terrifying anomalies.
I stopped sleeping in my master suite upstairs. Instead, I spent my nights in the basement control room, living off black coffee and cold stares at the monitors.
Angela Bailey was rewriting the rules of my house, and worse—she was doing it with a terrifying, unshakeable calm that defied my authority.
On Tuesday morning, Eric’s fingers moved.
It happened while Angela was reading aloud from an old leather-bound volume of poetry. Eric’s right hand, permanently curled into a stiff claw resting on the armrest of his chair, twitched. Once. Twice. The index finger straightened out, pressing against the leather armrest with a faint, dry tap.
I threw my coffee cup against the basement wall. The ceramic shattered into a dozen jagged pieces, dark liquid splattering across my polished concrete floor.
“Damn it!” I roared, though the glass-enclosed monitors muffled my voice.
I picked up the house intercom, my thumb pressing down hard on the talk button.
“Angela,” I barked, my voice trembling with suppressed rage. “Report to my study immediately.”
When she walked into my study three minutes later, she didn't look chastised. She looked like a woman who had expected my summons since dawn. She wore her usual practical sweater, her hands clasped loosely in front of her.
“You’re encouraging false hope,” I said, standing behind my desk and leaning forward, putting my weight on my palms. “You are filling their heads—and mine—with statistical noise. Dr. Harrison reviewed the neural scans yesterday. He confirmed that motor recovery at their level of trauma is medically impossible.”
Angela looked at me with those infuriatingly steady eyes.
“Dr. Harrison looks at data from two years ago, Mr. Grant,” she said quietly. “He looks at dead tissue on an MRI machine. He doesn't look at the boys.”
“I pay Dr. Harrison half a million dollars a year to be objective!” I slammed my hand down on the desk. “I will not have a traveling nurse with a two-year certificate playing Dr. Frankenstein in my home. If I catch you manipulating their limbs or filling their heads with fairy tales again, you’re out on the street before you can pack your duffel bag.”
Angela didn't blink. She took one step closer to the desk, lowering her voice until it was barely above a whisper, but the intensity in her tone made my blood run cold.
“You can fire me, Mr. Grant,” she said. “You can throw me out into the Chicago rain, and you can hire the twelfth caregiver, and the thirteenth, and the twentieth. But every time you look at those monitors, you’re going to wonder if you’re the reason your sons are still sitting in those chairs.”
May you like
The words hit me like a physical blow to the chest.
Before I could formulate a reply—before I could summon the full weight of my anger and order her out of the room—she turned on her heel and walked out, leaving me alone in the silent, suffocating gloom of my study.
