Chapter 2 - The Medical LedgerInside the safe sat three thick leather binders, a stack of offshore bearer bonds, four encrypted thumb drives, and a manila folder marked with a bright red medical cross.
I ignored the financial ledgers first and reached straight for the manila folder.
Printed across the top of the primary document in stark, official typeface were the words:
NORTHWESTERN DIAGNOSTIC LABORATORIES
PATIENT: SABRINA ROLLINS — CONFIDENTIAL TOXICOLOGY & ENDOCRINE ANALYSIS
My heart took a sharp, painful leap against my ribs.
I opened the folder. Inside were two years' worth of monthly blood test manifests, prescriptions, and physician notes bearing the signature of Dr. Aris Thorne—a high-profile private physician whose retainers were paid directly through Kenneth’s corporate expense accounts.
My eyes scanned down the daily medication logs.
For twenty-four months, I had been taking a daily blue vitamin capsule provided by Kenneth’s "wellness program." He had brought me that capsule every single morning with a glass of warm lemon water, kissing my forehead, telling me he wanted to make sure I stayed healthy while managing my family's real estate firm.
I read the chemical composition listed in the toxicological report:
[COMPOUND: SYNTHETIC CORTICOSTEROID & NEURO-SUPPRESSIVE AGENT — DOSAGE: HIGH-DOSE DAILY ADMINISTRATION.]
[CLINICAL EFFECT: CHRONIC FATIGUE, MEMORY LAPSES, PROGRESSIVE COGNITIVE DECLINE, COGNITIVE FOG, SENSATION OF SEVERE BURNOUT.]
A cold, horrifying wave of nausea washed over me. I stumbled backward, my back slamming against the mahogany desk.
The sudden memory lapses I had suffered over the last eighteen months. The days I couldn't remember where I had left my car keys. The board meetings where I felt so exhausted, so mentally paralyzed, that I had willingly signed over my voting proxies to Kenneth because I believed my mind was deteriorating from early-onset dementia.
It wasn't dementia.
It wasn't burnout.
My husband had been systematically poisoning my mind for two years, deliberately inducing cognitive failure so I would hand over control of my family's seventy-million-dollar real estate conglomerate, Vance Enterprises, before I turned thirty-five.
Tears of pure, cold fury burned behind my eyes, but I didn't cry. The pain inside my chest turned into something cold, hard, and absolute.
I turned to the final page of the medical file.
Attached to the back of the toxicology report was a confidential contract signed eight months ago.
The contract was an agreement between Kenneth Rollins... and my stepmother, Eleanor Vance.
The handwritten note on the margin, written in Eleanor’s distinctive, aristocratic cursive, read:
May you like
"Keep the dosage steady until the quarterly shareholder vote in November. Once Sabrina signs the trust transfer, we execute the secondary conservatorship."
Kenneth wasn't the mastermind. He was just the greedy, mercenary hound Eleanor had hired to tear me apart from the inside.
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