Two officers came into the corridor — I had asked the front desk to call them twenty minutes earlier, when the labs first told me what I was looking at.
That was the part that no one in the corridor had noticed, and the part I was most quietly proud of.
In the same few minutes that I was reading the panel and stopping the surgery and beginning the treatment that would save Gethin’s life, I had also, without any visible fuss, set in motion the thing that would end Carys Renton’s.
The moment the numbers told me this was a poisoning and not an accident, I understood two things at once: that my husband needed a specific treatment immediately, and that a crime had been committed and the evidence of it — the labs, the timeline, the physical samples — was perishable and needed to be secured before anyone could think to interfere with it.
So I did both.
I ordered the treatment, and I had the desk call the police, and I began writing out the timeline while the drama in the corridor unfolded around me, because a toxicology screen is not only medicine, it is evidence, and I have testified in enough cases to know exactly how to preserve a chain of it.