Because then she opened a different folder. A thinner one. And she asked me a question that had nothing to do with my stomach.
“Mrs. Vanterpool. Have you ever been seen through a private research facility?”
“Not that I know of.”
“There’s an archived reference in your record. It’s attached to something called Kastellis Biomedical.”
And I sat up in that chair.
“Kastellis?”
“Yes. Does that mean anything?”
And I turned and looked at my son.
Because for twelve years I had kept one thing to myself and never said it out loud to a living soul.
Three days before my husband died, a woman came onto that ward.
Mid-sixties, grey, a small silver case. She asked for Rutger by name at the nurses’ station and she knew exactly which bay he was in.
She was in there about twenty minutes with the curtain pulled round the bed.
And I sat on a plastic chair in that corridor and did not think one suspicious thing about it, because I was sixty-eight years old and my husband was dying and I had other things on.
