But Chloe couldn’t hear her. Her brain was submerged in a chemical nightmare, staring at horrors only she could see. “Emily… Emily, I’m sorry,” Chloe suddenly babbled, her voice rising to a high-pitched, hysterical pitch that sent a chill down my spine. “I’m sorry I stole it! Stop looking at me like that! I’m sorry!”
On the other side of the curtain, my parents froze. The silence that followed was absolute. I held my breath, the agonizing pain in my stitched side momentarily forgotten.
“I had to do it,” Chloe sobbed, arguing violently with a ghost only she could perceive. “She was too smart. You guys loved her more, I saw the way Dad looked at her report cards! I had to make you hate her! I faked the hospital records… I bought those pills from a dealer and hid them in her room. I took the loans in her name! The business… my whole company… the cars, the house… it’s all Emily’s credit! I forged it all!”
“Chloe, sweetheart, what are you saying? You’re dreaming,” my father asked, his voice shaking violently, the very foundation of his reality beginning to crack under the weight of her delirious words.
But Chloe was completely lost, purging her darkest, most calcified sins to the imaginary reaper standing at the foot of her bed. “And the letters… oh God, the awful letters,” she wailed, choking on her own tears. “Emily never wrote those letters telling you to die. It was me! I typed them! I bought the fake stamps! I needed you to cut her out of the will! I needed to be the only one left!”
A horrifying, suffocating silence descended upon the hospital room. On my side of the curtain, a single, cold, bitter tear slid down my cheek, soaking into the pristine white pillowcase. Five years of unimaginable agony, of starving and crying myself to sleep, validated in the pathetic ravings of a drug-addled traitor.
I heard my mother gasp for air, a sharp, ragged sound like a drowning woman breaking the surface. I heard my father stumble backward, his heavy frame colliding heavily with a metal medical cart, sending instruments clattering to the floor.
Before either of them could formulate a single word, the room door swung open once again.
Firm, purposeful, and unyielding footsteps echoed sharply on the linoleum floor. The medical curtain was violently ripped back, the metal rings screeching against the ceiling track.
Standing there was Arthur, my husband. He was immaculately dressed in a tailored charcoal bespoke suit, his face carved from absolute granite. In one hand, he held a sleek, heavily reinforced black leather briefcase. In the other, he held the terrified, wide-eyed gaze of my parents.