Chapter 6 - The Broken Mirror
By 5:00 AM, the rain had stopped, leaving the streets of Portland wrapped in a thick, gray morning mist.
Using Mae’s coat, a pair of worn canvas sneakers she gave me, and a baseball cap pulled low over my face, I walked six miles through the industrial district toward the west side of the city.
My target was not our house in the suburbs. It was a modest, two-story craftsman home in the Hawthorne neighborhood—the home of Dr. Harrison Vance.
If Adrian had paid Vance to create those fake medical records, the original draft files, communication logs, or payment receipts had to exist somewhere. A man who lost his medical license for greed wouldn't destroy his leverage against a wealthy hospital chief like Adrian Cole. He would keep it as insurance.
I crept around the back of Vance’s property. The yard was overgrown with wild blackberry bushes, the gutters sagging under the weight of wet pine needles.
I checked the kitchen window. Unlocked.
I pushed the frame up slowly, the wood creaking softly in the quiet morning, and slid inside onto the linoleum floor. The house smelled of stale tobacco, sour coffee, and old yellowed paper.
"Who's there?" a raspy, slurred voice called out from the living room.
I stepped out of the kitchen.
Sitting in a worn leather armchair, surrounded by stacks of old medical journals and empty liquor bottles, was Harrison Vance. He looked seventy, though his medical file said he was fifty-five. His hair was greasy, his cardigan stained with soup, his eyes yellowed from liver failure.
He looked up at me, his bleary eyes struggling to focus on my mud-streaked face.
"Are you... looking for pills?" he mumbled, reaching for his cane. "I don't keep narcotics here anymore. The state took my license."
"I'm not looking for pills, Dr. Vance," I said, stepping closer, keeping my hands visible. "I'm looking for Laura Cole's file."
The name hit him like a bucket of ice water.
Vance’s posture went rigid. The lazy, drunken fog in his eyes instantly evaporated, replaced by a sharp, desperate fear. He reached for a heavy brass lamp on the side table.
"Get out," he rasped, his voice trembling. "Get out of my house!"
"Adrian Cole put a rubber tube inside my nine-year-old son's leg!" I shouted, taking a step toward him, my voice ringing through the cluttered room with a force that made him flinch. "He infected him! And then he used the papers you forged to convince the police I'm a lunatic!"
Vance swallowed hard, his hand freezing on the lamp stem. "I... I don't know what you're talking about."
"You do know!" I took the printed news article about his license revocation from my pocket and threw it onto his lap. "You signed three involuntary commitment forms for a woman you've never met! Adrian paid you off! But you kept the receipts, didn't you? A disgraced doctor like you wouldn't do a felony favor for a Chief of Vascular without keeping proof to protect yourself!"
"He'll ruin me," Vance whimpered, burying his head in his trembling hands. "You don't know what Adrian is, Laura. He isn't just a surgeon. He’s on the state medical oversight board. If I go to the police, he'll make sure I spend the rest of my life in a state penitentiary!"
"He's going to kill my son!" I yelled, dropping to my knees right in front of his chair, grabbing his worn cardigan with both hands. "He's going to take Caleb today! If you have any tiny piece of humanity left in you... if you ever took the Hippocratic Oath for a real reason... help me save my boy!"
Vance looked into my eyes. He saw the wild, unbroken devotion of a mother who had jumped off a roof and walked six miles through the freezing mud.
He closed his eyes, letting out a long, shuddering sigh.
"In the basement," Vance whispered. "Inside the old safe behind the furnace. The combination is 14-32-09. There's an encrypted flash drive labeled Cole_Retainer."
He looked at me with deep, hollow regret. "He paid me forty thousand dollars in cash three years ago to create that digital psychiatric history. The drive has his original emails, his wire transfers, and the audio recording of him instructing me on what diagnoses to fake."
I didn't waste a second.
I ran down the creaky wooden stairs into the dark basement, found the rusted iron safe behind the furnace, and dialed the combination.
The heavy door clicked open.
Inside, sitting on top of a stack of old dollar bills, was a small red metallic USB flash drive.
I grabbed it, holding it against my chest like a holy relic.
May you like
I had the key to my freedom. I had the blade to cut Adrian’s web to pieces.
Now I just had to get to the courthouse before Adrian took Caleb away forever.
