Chapter 40: The First Patient

 

Rhys stared at the birth certificate.

For a moment, the noises around the annex seemed to recede: the police radios, the idling engines, the restless voices behind the doors.

“My brother?” he repeated.

Marguerite held the paper out. He did not take it, so Elara did.

Gabriel Laurent Calloway. Born March 1996. Father: Marcus Calloway.

“Your father had another son,” Marguerite said. “Before he married your mother.”

Rhys looked at her. “You expect me to believe my father kept a child hidden, and you helped him?”

“I helped his mother hide him from Augustin.”

“Why?”

Marguerite glanced at Brandt. “Because the family was not safe for him.”

Elara read the certificate again. The mother's name was Sylvie Laurent. An unfamiliar woman who had once held a baby with the Calloway name.

“Where is Gabriel now?” she asked.

Marguerite's silence answered nothing.

A sharp crack came from the third floor.

Everyone turned.

The open window flashed orange.

“Back!” Brandt shouted.

Glass burst outward, scattering over the pavement. A gust carried hot chemical fumes into the street. Elara caught Rhys's sleeve as he started toward the entrance.

“Not in there.”

“Vale is still inside.”

“And so are the records,” Marguerite whispered.

Firefighters pushed past them with breathing apparatus. Brandt ordered the street cleared, then drew Marguerite beneath the pharmacy awning.

“You said Vale was copying documents,” he told her. “What was he using?”

“A portable scanner. His laptop. There were bottles on the floor, but I thought they were cleaning supplies.”

“Did you see him start the fire?”

“No.”

Brandt motioned an officer closer. “Stay with her. Nobody leaves.”

Marguerite flinched but did not protest.

Rhys remained in the rain, staring at the burning window. Elara stood beside him with the certificate held safely inside her coat.

“What do you remember about your father?” she asked.

“He died when I was eleven. An accident at sea.”

“And Gabriel?”

“Nothing.” Rhys swallowed. “That's what frightens me. There should be something. A conversation overheard. A photograph hidden badly. Anything.”

“You were a child.”

“I lived in that house.”

He sounded less angry now than ashamed, as if failing to remember were another crime committed against his brother.

Elara reached for his hand. This time, he caught hers first.

“You didn't hide him,” she said.

“How can you be sure?”

“Because you just tried to run into a burning building for evidence that he existed.”

He looked at her then, rain threading through his dark hair. He held her hand until Brandt called them under the awning.

 

The fire crews contained the blaze to one room. Vale had escaped through a service passage before the officers secured it. The scanner was ruined; his laptop was gone.

But Marguerite's folder had survived.

Smoke clung to Rhys's coat. Elara smelled scorched paper, damp plaster, and beneath both a sweet medicinal edge that reminded her of the hidden note in his tea. A resemblance was not proof. She called Priya and asked her to make certain the sachets were sealed, photographed, and documented before testing. Too many people had already profited from evidence that vanished.

Brandt examined the handwritten observations while a technician photographed each page.

“Who wrote these?” he asked.

“Lucille Quinn,” Marguerite said.

Elara lifted her head.

“She wasn't employed by Saint-Claire,” Marguerite continued. “Sylvie brought her in. Gabriel had stopped recognizing familiar smells. His doctors called it an infection. Lucille said the boy's symptoms followed his treatments.”

“And Rhys?”

“Augustin allowed the doctors to test the same preparations on him. They called it a comparison.”

Rhys's face hardened. “He volunteered me?”

“I don't know what they told him.”

It was a careful answer. Elara did not mistake it for an innocent one.

“Why did my mother stay?”

“Because she believed she could prove what the treatments were doing.” Marguerite looked down. “Then someone discovered she'd kept samples.”

Elara felt the familiar weight of the enamel box, absent from her pocket but suddenly present in her thoughts.

“Where did she put them?”

“I never knew. She stopped trusting me.”

Brandt turned the final page over. Its reverse bore a line of cramped handwriting.

He read it once, then passed it to Elara.

The ink was faded, but her mother's precise letters remained unmistakable.

If anything happens to me, find the second boy. He knows who ordered the first dose.

Rhys leaned close enough to read over her shoulder.

“Gabriel was five,” he said. “How could he know?”

Before anyone answered, Marguerite spoke, so quietly they almost missed it.

“Because Gabriel wasn't the first patient.”

She looked directly at Rhys.

“You were.”