The clinic smelled different at night.
Not cleaner—just emptier. As if the building relaxed once the patients were gone, its walls no longer pretending to care.
I signed in at the front desk with a name I barely recognized as my own. The receptionist didn't look up. She slid a visitor's badge across the counter and pointed down the hallway.
"Records office. End of the corridor."
No condolences.
No recognition.
Good.
The records room was small, windowless, and cold enough to discourage curiosity. A man sat behind a desk stacked with folders, his glasses perched low on his nose.
"I'm here about my wife," I said, placing her name gently between us.
He typed. Paused. Typed again.
His fingers slowed.
"That file is… restricted."
Restricted.
The word settled badly in my chest.
"Restricted how?" I asked.
He adjusted his glasses. "Administrative hold."
"For what reason?"
He hesitated. Just long enough.
"I'm not authorized to say."
I nodded, as if that made sense. "Then authorize someone who is."
He sighed and stood, disappearing through a side door. I waited, counting seconds I didn't feel.
When he returned, he didn't meet my eyes.
"You can view a summary," he said. "Nothing more."
He turned the monitor toward me.
What I saw didn't match what I had been told.
Dates were wrong.
Notes were missing.
A test result I'd seen on her email wasn't there at all.
"This ultrasound," I said quietly. "Where is it?"
He stiffened. "If it's not listed—"
"It exists," I interrupted. "I saw the message."
Silence stretched between us, thick and defensive.
Then he leaned closer and lowered his voice.
"Off the record," he said, "some files get… corrected. For liability reasons."
Corrected.
I stared at the screen, my reflection faint in the glass.
"Who corrected it?"
He shook his head. "You don't want to go down this road."
That was the second time someone had said that to me in forty-eight hours.
Both times, they were wrong.
I left without raising my voice. Without threatening. Without emotion. Systems were trained to recognize anger. Calm slipped past unnoticed.
Outside, I sat in my car and wrote down everything I remembered. Dates. Names. Times. Details so small they'd be dismissed as irrelevant—until they weren't.
Patterns began to form.
This wasn't one mistake.
It was many.
And someone had tried to clean them up.
My phone buzzed.
An unknown number.
I answered.
"You're asking questions," a woman's voice said. Older. Tired. Careful.
"Who is this?"
"Someone who made the same mistake you're making now."
Silence again—but this one was deliberate.
"They won't admit fault," she continued. "They never do. They delay. They bury. They wait for you to get tired."
"I'm not tired," I said.
A pause.
"That's what I thought too," she replied softly. "Until they took everything I had left."
The call ended.
I sat there long after, the engine cold, the streetlights humming overhead.
Heaven hadn't warned me.
But the living had.
I started the car.
This wasn't grief anymore.
This was a reckoning.