Chapter Twelve: Sofia Costello
917 Words
The medical bay felt smaller after Frank left.
Not physically. The equipment was still where it was. Nothing had moved.
But the air was different without Frank in it, and I noticed that and hated that I noticed it and decided that was enough of the medical bay for one morning.
I checked Marco's vitals one last time. Nothing new.
I walked back toward my room with my hands in my pockets and my mind doing the thing it did when I gave it too much space — running the same loop over and over without arriving anywhere useful.
Each piece refusing to fit cleanly with the others. Like a diagnosis where the symptoms pointed in three different directions, and none of them led to a single clean answer.
I stopped outside my room door and stood there for a second with my hand on the handle.
Go in. Wash your face. Change your clothes. Be a person.
I pushed it open.
The room looked the same. Everything exactly as I'd left it.
Except.
On the pillow, an envelope. Manila. Thick.
I stood in the doorway and looked at it.
Then, I decided to go in and get a proper look.
I sat on the edge of the bed and picked it up.
Mild tremor. Elevated heart rate. Shallow respiratory pattern.
Diagnosis: You already know this is going to change something.
Prognosis: unknown.
I turned the envelope over.
Nothing on the back either. Just sealed. Waiting. Completely certain of the damage it was about to do and completely indifferent to it.
Who entered my room and left an envelope on my pillow at the exact moment they knew it would be empty.
The exact moment they knew I'd be in the medical bay.
My hands betrayed me, but the rest of me didn’t.
I looked down at the envelope, slid my finger under the seal, and reached inside.
My fingers found the edge of a document. Official paper. The kind with headers and case numbers and the particular bureaucratic language of institutions that dealt in facts too large for ordinary words.
I pulled it out and read the header. My hands were completely still now.
The tremor gone.
The kind of still that came after something landed. After the body absorbed the impact and went quiet because there was nothing left to brace for.
I looked at the document in my hands. Read the header one more time, just to be certain.
I sat on the edge of the bed holding a marriage certificate and a death certificate with the same woman's name on both.
Sofia Costello.
He had a wife.
I closed the file, stood up, and walked straight to Frank's office.
I found him in his office.
I threw the file on his desk.
It landed hard. Papers scattered across his laptop, across his coffee, across whatever he'd been reading that was apparently more important than the fact that there was a marriage certificate and dead persons file sitting on my pillow this morning.
He looked at it. Then at me.
"Who is she?"
Not a question. I was done asking questions.
"Jane—"
"Who was she, Frank? Because I got to my room and there was a file sitting on my pillow. A marriage certificate. And a death certificate. Same name on both." I stepped forward. "Sofia Costello. Your wife.”
He didn't answer.
"You were married."
"It was a long time ago.”
"And she died. Here. In this compound."
"Yes."
"And nobody found it suspicious that the wife of the most powerful man in the city died of cardiac arrest at twenty-six.”
"Jane—”
"What happened to her?"
"She died."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's the only answer I have."
"It's the only answer you're giving me." I picked up the death certificate. Held it between us.
"Cardiac arrest Frank. At twenty-six. In your compound. With your facility. With your doctors." My hand was shaking. "With Rosabella.”
"There were things happening. Inside the family. People I trusted who—”
"So someone killed her."
He didn't answer.
"Is that why you needed a doctor you could trust? Is that why you watched my clinic for six weeks? Is that why—" I paused.
"Is that what this is? Was I just a convenience.”
My phone buzzed on the desk between us.
We both looked at it.
Unknown number.
I reached for it. Frank's hand came down on my wrist. Not hard. Just there.
"Let me go."
"Jane—”
He released me, and I answered the call. Breathing first. Slow and patient. The breathing of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment.
Then, a voice. Low. Smooth. Completely unhurried.
"You found the file." The voice said. Almost warm. Almost kind. "Good. I wasn't sure you'd open it. Some women don't want to know."
“I’m not most women.”
I turned away from Frank. Faced the window. My reflection looking back at me pale.
"Who is this?”
"Ask him what happened to her body, Jane."
The line went dead.
The room was completely silent.
I stood at the window with the dead phone in my hand. I turned around slowly.
Frank was looking at me with an expression that lived in the space between guilt, grief, and fear.
"Frank. What happened to her body?"
He didn't answer.
And the silence that followed was the worst thing he had ever done to me.
- Writer
