Chapter 4 - The Poisoned Well
I managed to pry the cabinet open with a metal ruler I found on the floor. It wasn't full of medical records, but journals. Dozens of them.
I sat on the attic floor and opened the oldest one. The date was twenty-five years ago. “Emily has a fever again. The doctors look concerned. It’s perfect. It makes them pay so much more attention to me.”
My breath hitched. I flipped through the pages. The journal was a meticulous chronicle of every illness I had suffered as a child—all of them mysterious, all of them unexplained, and all of them coinciding with moments when my mother felt neglected.
“She’s so resilient,” she had written in one entry. “She’s the perfect subject. She never tells them the truth because she’s too afraid of what happens if she does.”
I was reading about my own Munchausen by proxy childhood. My mother hadn't just been "overprotective"; she had been actively inducing my symptoms to garner attention and maintain control. She wasn't caring for Ethan; she was recreating her masterpiece.
I heard the heavy thud of footsteps on the stairs. I stuffed the journals into my bag just as the attic door swung open. Sarah stood there, holding a glass of iced tea, looking perfectly composed.
"You shouldn't have looked, Emily," she said softly. "Some histories are better left buried in the garden."
"You did this to me," I whispered, the weight of the realization crushing my lungs. "You sick, twisted woman. You did this to me, and now you’re doing it to my son."
May you like
She smiled, a slow, predatory expression. "I’m not doing anything. I’m just providing the environment. Ethan is just like you, Emily. He’s a bridge. A way for us to be a family again."
She took a step toward me, and in her hand, I saw it—a small, silver syringe. The air in the attic seemed to vibrate with a sudden, violent tension. I knew then that she wouldn't let me leave. Not with the truth in my bag. Not with the threat I now posed to her perfect, poisoned world.
