Chapter 2 - THE HUNDREDTH DOCTOR
I did not call Dr. Vale.
That surprised everyone.
It surprised me most.
For eight years, every medical decision flowed through Stephen Vale. He had been my neurologist, medical coordinator, and often the person who filtered other specialists’ opinions before they reached me.
Instead, I called Dr. Mara Chen.
I had never met her.
Three years earlier, the director of a neurological rehabilitation institute in Chicago recommended her after reviewing my case. Vale dismissed the suggestion.
“Chen specializes in incomplete injuries and functional overlay,” he had said. “Your situation is structurally different.”
At the time, I accepted that.
At 3:20 that Tuesday afternoon, I told my assistant to get Mara Chen on a plane.
She arrived shortly before midnight.
She was fifty-one, compact, direct, and visibly unimpressed by money.
That alone made me like her.
She entered my private medical suite carrying one bag.
“No entourage?” I asked.
“I’m a neurologist, not Beyoncé.”
Lily would have liked her.
Chen spent nearly two hours examining me.
She tested reflexes, sensation, muscle tone, hip activation, knee extension, ankle movement, and responses I had stopped thinking about years earlier.
Most attempts produced nothing useful.
Then she asked me to talk about Audrey.
I looked at her.
“What?”
“Your wife.”
“That is not neurological testing.”
“Humor me.”
I disliked the phrase.
I disliked her method.
I disliked that she kept staring at my right foot while asking about the worst day of my life.
I described the crash.
The ambulance.
Waking without Audrey.
My shoe moved.
Barely.
Chen saw it.
“So the child wasn’t imagining things.”
“No.”
“Again.”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t try.”
She asked me about Lily.
I told her about the dance.
The insult.
The hot-dog routine.
Against my will, I smiled.
My toes flexed.
Chen leaned back.
“Well.”
I gripped the wheelchair arms.
“Well what?”
“You have voluntary or semi-voluntary motor activity where your current summary says none exists.”
“Does that mean I can walk?”
“No.”
The answer came immediately.
I hated her for it.
She continued.
“It means anyone promising that you can walk is lying. Anyone telling you there is nothing worth investigating may also be wrong.”
That was not hope.
Not yet.
But it was a door.
Chen ordered new imaging, nerve-conduction studies, electromyography, muscle ultrasound, and a complete review of every previous test.
The mansion medical staff worked until dawn.
Lily and Mateo had been sent home with Elena hours earlier.
Before leaving, Lily stuck her head through the winter garden doors.
“Don’t turn back into a statue before tomorrow.”
One guard started objecting.
I said, “Goodnight, Lily.”
Her expression suggested she had won something.
Maybe she had.
By breakfast, Dominic arrived carrying two file boxes.
He wore a navy suit, pale tie, and the exhausted expression of a man inconvenienced by someone else’s emergency.
Dominic was forty-four, two years older than me.
We grew up more like brothers than cousins.
His father died when he was twelve. Mine took him in.
When Audrey and I married, Dominic stood beside me.
When the crash happened, he slept in the hospital waiting room.
When I woke without the use of my legs, he took over company meetings I could not face.
I trusted him with everything.
He placed the boxes on my desk.
“Medical records.”
“All of them?”
“As far as I know.”
Dr. Chen stood beside the window.
Dominic looked at her.
“And you are?”
“The hundredth doctor.”
He did not smile.
I explained what happened.
His response remained cautious.
“Caleb, I want this to be real.”
“Yesterday you called it impossible.”
“I was protecting you.”
“From what?”
“Hope.”
The word irritated me.
I had begun noticing how often people claimed to protect me while removing choices.
Chen opened the first box.
Within twenty minutes, she found inconsistencies.
A rehabilitation discharge summary referenced an EMG performed nine months after the accident.
The test itself was missing.
Another physician mentioned “preserved distal recruitment on the right.”
That phrase appeared nowhere in the condensed medical history Vale gave later specialists.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Chen looked up.
“It suggests at least some motor-unit activation survived.”
“Enough to walk?”
“Stop asking me that.”
Dominic folded his arms.
“Stephen explained those findings. Reflex noise.”
Chen glanced at him.
“You’re a neurologist?”
“No.”
“Then perhaps Stephen should explain it himself.”
Dominic stiffened.
By noon, my staff located the laboratory that performed the old EMG.
The facility had changed ownership twice.
Archives took hours to retrieve.
At 4:16 p.m., the report arrived.
Dr. Chen read it silently.
Then again.
“Tell me.”
She set it down.
“Your injury was severe. No one fabricated that.”
I waited.
“But this study recorded low-level voluntary recruitment in muscles controlling your right ankle.”
My throat tightened.
“When?”
“Seven years ago.”
One year after the crash.
I stared at Dominic.
He shook his head.
“I never saw that.”
“Who received it?”
Chen pointed to the distribution list.
Dr. Stephen Vale.
Dominic Marino, medical power-of-attorney representative.
My name was not listed.
I looked at him.
“You had medical power of attorney because I was unconscious.”
“You renewed it during rehabilitation.”
“Because Audrey was dead and I could barely sign my own name without shaking.”
“I handled what you couldn’t.”
“Did you see this report?”
“No.”
“Look at me.”
He did.
“Did you see it?”
“I don’t remember.”
Dominic never forgot documents involving money.
He never forgot board votes.
He remembered shipping manifests from fifteen years earlier.
But the report showing my supposedly dead foot had voluntary motor activity disappeared from his memory.
Chen interrupted.
“There’s another issue.”
She placed my latest imaging beside scans from the first year.
“The structural injury does not disappear. You have permanent damage. Muscle wasting. Joint changes. Years without standing.”
I felt disappointment arriving before she finished.
“But?”
“But your current responses are inconsistent with complete motor paralysis.”
I waited.
“What does that mean?”
“It means there may be a combination of incomplete spinal injury, disuse, and neurological suppression worsened by trauma.”
“Psychological?”
“Neurological. Psychological stress affects neurological function without making symptoms imaginary.”
Dominic scoffed softly.
Chen turned.
“If you plan to interrupt my explanation with nineteenth-century medicine, leave.”
I almost laughed again.
My foot twitched.
Chen saw it.
“So did Dominic.
His face changed.
Only for a second.
But I had spent my life reading men across negotiating tables.
That was not wonder.
It looked like fear.
The next morning, rehabilitation began.
It was humiliating.
Two therapists lifted me between parallel bars.
I could not support my weight.
My knees buckled.
Sweat soaked through my shirt within minutes.
I had once walked onto docks during strikes while hundreds of angry longshoremen shouted my name.
Now three seconds of supported standing made my vision dark.
Lily appeared at the doorway.
Elena stood behind her apologizing.
“Mr. Marino, I told her—”
“Let her stay.”
Lily watched me fail to lift my right foot.
“You’re making the angry eyebrows again.”
“Excellent medical observation.”
“You’re trying too hard.”
“My apologies. I’ll attempt paralysis more casually.”
One therapist coughed.
Lily grinned.
“Think about something funny.”
“There is currently nothing funny.”
She pointed toward my security chief.
“His tie looks like a sad banana.”
Every person in the room looked at the yellow patterned tie.
I laughed once.
My ankle activated.
The therapist shouted.
“Again!”
I immediately lost it.
Still, something had happened.
For the first time, effort and movement occupied the same room.
That evening, I called a meeting with estate security.
Not Dominic’s people.
Mine.
I requested access logs from my medical suite dating back as far as backups allowed.
Most did not exist.
One archive survived on an old server.
The data showed an entry seven years earlier.
Dr. Vale entered the rehabilitation room at 6:12 p.m.
He left at 6:49.
Dominic entered at 7:03.
He remained sixteen minutes.
The digital file inventory changed immediately afterward.
One scanned document was deleted.
Its archive label contained three letters.
EMG.
I sat alone staring at the screen.
There were explanations.
Administrative errors.
Duplicate files.
Routine cleanup.
I had spent decades destroying competitors who confused possibilities with proof.
I would not make that mistake now.
Then my security chief spoke.
“Sir, there’s something else.”
He opened a second log.
Someone had accessed the mansion’s old service corridor repeatedly during the last eight months.
Not Lily.
An adult security credential.
“Whose badge?”
He enlarged the record.
Dominic Marino.
My cousin had been entering the passage behind the winter garden.
The same passage Lily used to watch my foot.
And he had entered it three nights earlier.
I looked toward the narrow window behind the fountain.
May you like
Lily had been watching me for three weeks.
Dominic had been watching me much longer.
