Then came the final ten days.
During those last ten days, the isolation requirements were over. I saw photographs of Marcus on the hospital’s internal network, smiling at a gala dinner alongside visiting foreign specialists. Then I watched him appear in a local television interview. Then I saw him standing onstage accepting a clinical excellence award.
Yet throughout those ten entire days, the phone in my hospital room never rang.
Not once.
My career as a senior healthcare quality auditor had taught me one essential rule: before reacting, verify the data.
I opened my tablet, signed into the hospital’s administrative portal, and accessed the official protocol guidelines governing the transplant project. Within five minutes, I located Section 4, Paragraph B:
Personnel in isolation may request a temporary dispensation of up to two hours for immediate family medical emergencies, life-threatening illnesses, or surgical procedures, subject to standard re-sanitizations.
For illustration purposes only
Next, I searched the system records for every dispensation request submitted under Dr. Marcus Hayes.
Zero.
Not one request had ever been filed.
He had possessed the explicit right to visit me. He had possessed the means to do it. He simply decided not to. And once the quarantine was completely lifted, he had ten full days to walk toward an elevator, press the button for the seventeenth floor, and come down the hallway.
He chose not to do that, either.
I saved PDF copies of the protocol, his shift records, and the public event registries to a cloud drive. Then I ordered an Uber.
I didn’t return to our brownstone in Lincoln Park. Instead, I went directly to the law office of my university friend, Sarah, a family law attorney.
When Sarah saw how thin and frail I looked, she jumped to her feet so quickly that her chair scraped across the hardwood floor. “Clara! My God, what happened to you?”
“I need you to draft divorce papers,” I said evenly.
At first, she assumed I was speaking from the immediate bitterness of everything I had endured. So I placed my tablet on her desk and walked her through the timeline, the system logs, and the protocol documents.
I didn’t want revenge. I had no desire to take his assets from him. We didn’t have children. I proposed an equal 50/50 division of the equity in the home we had purchased during our marriage, while each of us would retain our own bank accounts, vehicles, and personal belongings.
