Now you wonder if some of that helplessness was arranged for you.
Dr. Salazar holds up two bottles.
“These are not what I prescribed.”
The room changes.
She explains quickly. Wrong concentration. Wrong timing. Not poison. Something more cunning. Enough to deepen lethargy, blur cognition, reduce motor response, and make a half-paralyzed man look almost fully gone.
Someone wanted you quieter than illness required.
Teresa blurts out that she kept the old bottles because something felt wrong. Mauricio had started arriving with pharmacy bags himself after the last nurse left. She had hidden them in the pantry.
Dr. Salazar closes her eyes once. “Good,” she says. “Very good.”
That afternoon you fire the neurologist without ever seeing him.
You do it through Armando Vega, your family attorney, who arrives already halfway into war. He is old, vain about his pocket squares, and lethal with paper. The moment he hears you speak, his face changes—not into pity, but strategy.
“Tell me everything,” he says.
So you do.