Chapter 398
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Chapter 398:
“My baby…” Carmen whimpered, her voice cracking with raw agony.
Dr. Foster leaned forward, his clinical instincts keeping his tone carefully neutral but supportive, avoiding anything that might plant a false memory.
“What do you see, Carmen?” Dr. Foster asked gently. “Tell me more about the baby’s cry. What exactly are you feeling in your body right now p>
Carmen shook her head frantically against the leather headrest.
“No,” Carmen sobbed, her chest heaving. “I hear the nurse. She said — ‘It’s a boy. Vitals are weak p>
The memory cut suddenly to black. The crying stopped. An overwhelming, crushing sensation of loss and separation swallowed her whole.
Her heart rate monitor spiked dangerously high.
Dr. Foster immediately snapped his fingers beside her ear, pulling her out of the hypnotic state.
Carmen’s eyes flew open. She gasped for air, sitting up so fast she nearly fell off the chair. She was drenched in sweat, trembling like a leaf in a hurricane.
She grabbed Dr. Foster’s forearm, her nails digging into his sleeve.
ѕ𝗵𝖺𝗿e уо𝘂𝗿 𝘵h𝗼𝘶𝘨h𝗍s 𝗼n
“I had a baby,” Carmen choked out, her eyes wide with terror and revelation. “I heard him cry p>
Dr. Foster handed her a cup of water. “Carmen, the subconscious often manifests our deepest fears as physical memories during trauma work. We need objective medical proof before we draw any conclusions p>
His words hit her like a bucket of ice water.
Proof. She needed the real files.
Carmen practically ran out of the clinic. She did not go back to her apartment. She hailed a cab and went straight to the Wolfe Hotel, bypassed her office, and used her CFO keycard to access the hotel’s secure server room.
She locked the heavy steel door behind her, opened her laptop, and connected to the dark web portal.
Hacker: I found a backdoor in the Massachusetts General cold-storage servers. You have a three-minute window. Pull the data now.
Carmen’s fingers flew across the keyboard. She routed her connection through the hotel’s encrypted mainframe to mask her location, breached the hospital’s archived database, and typed in her Social Security Number and the date of the crash from seven years ago.
Her heart hammered against her ribs.
A PDF file appeared on the screen, stamped in red: TOP SECRET — SEALED BY COURT ORDER.
She hit download. The progress bar crawled.
At ninety-nine percent, the hospital’s intrusion countermeasures triggered and severed the connection. But the file had already been saved to her encrypted USB drive.
Carmen pulled the drive and ran to her private office. She locked the door, plugged the drive into her desktop, and entered her decryption key.
The unredacted medical file opened.
She scrolled past the trauma reports and went directly to the OB/GYN surgical notes.
The black text burned into her retinas.
Diagnosis: 38 weeks pregnant. Placental abruption due to blunt force trauma. Emergency Cesarean section performed.
Carmen’s hand shook as she scrolled to the next page.
It was a scanned copy of a birth certificate.
Mother: Carmen Golden.
Infant Status: Alive. Transferred to NICU.