"Doctor, You Just Committed a Felony. Live on Camera."

§PROLOGUE

Death was not a dramatic, crashing crescendo.

It was a slow, sterile fade to silence.

Joelle remembered the scent first: antiseptic, sharp and clean, a smell that promised healing but delivered only oblivion.

Then came the weight, a crushing, invisible pressure on her chest that wasn't physical, but existential. The weight of despair.

Her last sight was the sickly green glow of the heart monitor, tracing a frantic, failing rhythm.

Her last sound was its final, quiet beep—a flatline that was not an ending, but a verdict.

Failure.

She had failed to fight, failed to be believed, failed to survive the slow poisoning of a lie. A lie that had metastasized from a whispered accusation into a social media cancer, eating away her life, her love, her will to exist. A lie she had let win.

So when her eyes fluttered open, not to an ethereal afterlife, but to the same harsh, humming fluorescent lights of an examination room, confusion warred with a primal, terrifying hope.

The air was the same, thick with the scent of disinfectant and anxiety.

The cold leather of the examination table was the same against her back.

And the voice... that voice was the same. A practiced symphony of gentle concern.

It wasn't a memory. It wasn't a nightmare from which she was waking.

It was a second chance.

In that singular, impossible moment, the Joelle who had faded away in a hospital bed, a ghost haunted by regret, was incinerated.

From her ashes, something new and terrifyingly calm took form.

This time, she wouldn't be the patient bleeding out on the table.

This time, she would be the surgeon. And she knew exactly where to make the first cut.

§01

"So, you see, the scarring here is quite extensive."

Dr. Alana Covington’s voice dripped with the kind of compassionate authority that had earned her two million TikTok followers and a lucrative sponsorship from a wellness vitamin brand.

Her manicured finger, tipped with a demure French polish that screamed 'professional yet approachable,' tapped a grainy, black-and-white image on the large monitor.

An ultrasound. Joelle's ultrasound. It was a cold, intimate map of her own body, now displayed like a prop in a twisted theater.

"Which is why I have to ask," Alana continued, her gaze shifting from the screen to Joelle. Her eyes, magnified by her designer glasses, were pools of theatrical pity. "Why would you hide a history of multiple terminations, Joelle? Especially from your fiancé?"

The question didn't just hang in the air; it solidified, turning the sterile room into a block of ice. Joelle’s mind, still reeling from the impossible reality of her return, struggled to process the words. Terminations? Plural?

"I... what?" she managed, the words catching in her throat. "That's not... that's from my endometriosis surgery. You know that. It's in my file."

Alana’s perfectly sculpted eyebrows arched in a silent, sorrowful question mark. It was a masterful performance of reluctant discovery.

Her gaze flickered for a microsecond toward the corner of her desk. Joelle followed it. There, clamped next to a monitor displaying patient charts, was a professional-grade ring light. Its brilliant white halo turned Alana’s face into that of a benevolent, truth-telling angel. Propped up just behind it, almost hidden, was her phone. The small red dot in the corner of the screen glowed like the eye of a predator.

She was broadcasting this. This violation. This vivisection of her life. Live.

A cascade of digital pings and chimes erupted from the phone's speaker, a ghostly applause from an invisible audience as virtual gifts and comments flooded in. The text bubbles were too small to read from this distance, but Joelle could imagine their content.

*Slut. Liar. Fraud.*

This wasn't a medical consultation. It was a modern-day witch trial, and she was already tied to the stake.

§02

"Alana, what's going on? I heard shouting. Is everything okay?"

The door swung open, and Graham Pollard, Joelle’s fiancé, rushed in. His handsome face, the face she had loved with a devotion that had ultimately killed her, was a mask of worry.

He was the final piece of the theatrical production. The betrayed lover.

Alana’s mask of professional concern crumbled on cue. It was a performance worthy of an award. Her eyes welled instantly with crocodile tears, her lower lip trembling as she stumbled, not away from Joelle, but directly into Graham's waiting, protective arms.

"Graham, I'm so, so sorry," she sobbed, burying her face in the fabric of his expensive button-down shirt. "I tried to handle this privately. I just... I couldn't stand by and watch you be deceived. Her records... they show she's had multiple procedures. She was trying to trick you, to trap you into a marriage built on a foundation of lies!"

Graham held her, his hand stroking her hair in a gesture of comfort that was a dagger in Joelle’s heart. His expression, as he looked over Alana’s shoulder at Joelle, hardened into something she had seen only in flashes in her past life, but now saw in its full, horrifying clarity. Cold. Accusatory. Final.

"Joelle," he said, his voice laced with a profound disgust that cut deeper than any scalpel. "How could you? After everything we talked about... honesty, trust... you lied to me?"

"Graham, no! It's not true," Joelle pleaded, the old, desperate instinct flaring for a moment before she crushed it. "She's twisting it. It was one surgery for endometriosis! I told you about it when we first started dating!"

"Dr. Covington is a professional, Joelle," Graham snapped, his grip tightening on Alana’s shoulder as if to shield her from Joelle’s words. "She's one of the best OB/GYNs in the state. Are you saying she can't read a simple ultrasound? That she would lie to me? Her oldest friend?"

He looked from Alana's tear-streaked, artfully vulnerable face to Joelle's shocked, desperate one. And he made the same choice he had made the first time. The choice that had signed her death warrant.

"I can't believe I was going to marry a liar," he spat, the words landing like stones. "You are disgusting."

The words struck Joelle, not as an injury, but as a key unlocking a cage. The ghost of her past life—the despair, the helplessness, the need to be believed—vanished in a puff of smoke. In its place rose a white-hot rage, so pure and intense it became a terrifying calm.

She took one deliberate step forward.

And with a crack that echoed like a gunshot in the small, silent room, she slapped Alana Covington hard across her perfectly made-up face.

§03

Alana shrieked.

It was a raw, undignified sound, a peeling away of her carefully constructed persona of gentle authority. Her head snapped back, and she stared at Joelle, a bright red handprint blooming on her pale cheek like a brand. Her eyes were wide, not with fear, but with the pure, narcissistic shock of someone who had never been challenged.

"You... you hit me! You absolute bitch!"

"That's for the HIPAA violation," Joelle said, her voice dangerously low and steady, each word a chip of ice. "Broadcasting a patient's private medical information without their consent is a federal crime. A felony."

She then turned her arctic gaze to Graham.

His face was a thundercloud of righteous fury. "Joelle, have you completely lost your mind? Apologize to her. Right now!"

He reached for her, perhaps to restrain her, perhaps to shake her.

He never got the chance.

Instead of an apology, Joelle’s hand moved again, a blur of motion. A second, sharper slap connected with Graham's cheek. The sound was even louder this time.

"And that," she said, her voice ringing with a newfound steel that made the air vibrate, "is for being a blind, pathetic, and utterly predictable fool."

The room fell into a stunned silence, broken only by the frantic, incessant chiming of notifications from Alana's phone. The livestream chat, no doubt, was going nuclear.

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