attraction.

Instead, I noticed a faint grayness beneath his skin.

“You look sick.”

“I was shot eight days ago.”

“You looked better while bleeding in the hospital.”

He almost smiled, then gripped the edge of a student’s desk.

I moved toward him.

“Christopher?”

His pupils were uneven.

Sweat had gathered near his hairline despite the cold classroom.

When he tried to straighten, his knees buckled.

I caught him badly, taking most of his weight against my good side.

A small amber prescription bottle fell from his coat and rolled beneath a table.

The label carried his name and instructions for pain medication.

But the tablets inside were pale blue.

I had watched him take a white tablet in the hospital.

Teachers survive by noticing what does not belong: the wrong handwriting on a permission slip, the child who stops raising her hand, the lunch that returns untouched three days in a row.

A color difference was small.

Small did not mean meaningless.

I called emergency services before Christopher could stop me.

“No private doctor,” I told the dispatcher.

“Send an ambulance.

Possible poisoning.”

His hand closed around my wrist, weak but urgent.

“Hannah, listen to me.

If this is internal—”

“Then your people are exactly who I should not call.”

For one second, he looked surprised.

Then he released me.

At the hospital, toxicology confirmed that the bottle contained a powerful blood-pressure medication, not painkillers.

Combined with Christopher’s blood loss and prescribed drugs, another dose might have killed him.

The label was genuine.

The pills were not.

Only three people had handled his medication: Franco, Dr.

Vale, and Dominic.

Franco arrived furious and frightened.

Dr.

Vale insisted the pharmacy had made an error.

Dominic appeared twenty minutes later, immaculate in a navy suit, carrying concern like a costume.

“This is what happens when outsiders become distractions,” he said, looking directly at me.

Christopher was unconscious, but I heard the warning.

Dominic leaned closer.

“You should return to your classroom.

Let family handle family matters.”

“Is that what you told the person taking pictures at Mercy?”

His expression remained pleasant, yet one finger tapped once against his silver watch.

It was the only visible crack.

I remembered that watch.

On the night I met Christopher, I had seen the same silver band reflected in the private suite’s door window just before Franco escorted me back to the emergency room.

At the time, I assumed it belonged to hospital staff.

Now Dominic wore it while claiming he had not visited Mercy that night.

I said nothing more.

When Christopher woke, I told him what I remembered.

He listened without interrupting.

“A reflection is not proof,” he said.

“No.

But liars often add details nobody asked for.

Dominic told me he wasn’t at Mercy before I accused him of being there.”

Franco’s eyes narrowed.

“He said he was in Newark that entire night.”

Christopher asked for Dominic’s travel records, security logs, and phone location history.

None would be enough alone.

Together, they began forming a pattern.

Dominic’s phone had gone offline forty minutes before the shooting and reconnected near Mercy Hospital.

A vehicle registered to one of his shell companies entered the hospital garage.

Dr.

Vale had received a large payment from a construction business controlled by Dominic’s brother-in-law.

Still, Christopher refused to