Chapter 3 - The Legal Trap Springs
Over the next five days, Fallon accessed my confidential medical files twenty-eight separate times.
The audit logs later revealed the full extent of her reckless curiosity. She opened my surgical reports, examined the itemized billing ledgers, downloaded clinical photographs of the burn sites, and read Dr. Harris's discharge summaries word for word.
The electronic record was undeniable. It confirmed the exact nature of my injuries, the $20,000 payment, the intensive grafting procedure, and the weeks of required immobilization.
Yet, trapped within the echo chamber of her own narcissism, Fallon decided the medical records were fake.
To her distorted mind, the idea that I could independently afford a $20,000 medical procedure was entirely impossible. It was far easier for her to believe that an entire metropolitan hospital network, a team of board-certified plastic surgeons, and federal health auditors had engaged in an elaborate, multi-million-dollar conspiracy simply to help me win an imaginary argument against her.
She marched straight to our mother and declared that I had bribed doctors to falsify official medical records.
Mom, eager as always to validate Fallon's delusions, swallowed the lie whole.
Three days later, they arrived at my apartment.
It was a bleak, freezing Tuesday afternoon. Rain hammered against the glass windows in relentless sheets. Tamsin was away on a twelve-hour shift at the trauma center, and I was half-asleep on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, when a violent, concussive pounding shook my front door.
"Maeve! Open this door right now!"
My mother's voice pierced through the wood. My heart skipped a beat. I reached instinctively for my phone on the side table, my fingers trembling.
Then Fallon chimed in, shouting shrilly. "We know you're hiding in there, you pathetic liar!"
Panic surged through me. I had never given them my address. Not once. But my hospital discharge paperwork—which Fallon had illegally downloaded from the medical database—contained my exact apartment number and building code.
I used my cane to push myself up from the sofa, gritting my teeth against the fierce pull of my healing skin. I hobbled to the entryway.
"Leave," I called out through the locked door.
Mom answered instantly. "We drove two hours through the rain to get here, Maeve. Don't you dare ignore us!"
"Then you've wasted four hours on a pointless round trip. Get off my property."
"Open this door or I swear I'll call the building manager and tell them you're experiencing a violent psychotic episode! Maybe the police can explain why your own mother isn't allowed to check on her daughter!"
I knew she would do it. Blythe had zero hesitation when it came to staging public scenes or destroying my reputation to get her way. She had done it when I was a teenager; she would do it now without batting an eye.
Hoping to de-escalate and shove them away before they caused a building-wide scandal, I turned the deadbolt and opened the door a mere two inches, keeping the security chain securely latched across the frame.
"I am fine," I said, staring through the narrow gap at their rain-soaked coats. "And if you don't leave right now, I am calling the police myself."
Before I could finish the sentence, Fallon slammed her full body weight against the exterior of the door.
The metal security chain ripped violently out of the drywall with a sharp screech of splintering wood. The heavy oak door flew inward, striking my right side with brutal force.
A white-hot flash of agony tore through my abdomen. I screamed out, stumbling backward and crashing hard against the hallway wall before collapsing onto the floor, clutching my torso as warm, wet heat began to seep through my bandages.
Fallon stepped across the threshold, dressed in an expensive cream trench coat that remained immaculate despite the rain. She sneered down at me.
"Well," Fallon said, looking around my modest living room with exaggerated disgust. "This is delightfully depressing."
Mom followed closely behind, calmly closing and locking the front door behind her as if she were arriving for Sunday dinner.
"Get out," I gasped, tears prickling my eyes from the searing pain in my side. "You just tore my grafts..."
Fallon ignored me completely, walking over to my secondhand sofa and running a gloved hand over the fabric. "Is this where you conduct your imaginary business empire, Maeve? Truly pathetic."
"I am calling 911," I whispered, reaching blindly for my phone where it had fallen on the rug.
Mom calmly removed her wet trench coat and draped it over the back of a dining chair. "Stop acting so dramatic, Maeve. We're family. We're just here to make sure you aren't starving."
She walked past me into the kitchen and opened my refrigerator without invitation.
I leaned against the wall, fighting waves of nausea, pressing my hand against my dressings. "Both of you... get out of my apartment right now."
Fallon locked her eyes onto the thick white bandages visible beneath the hem of my loose cotton shirt. A cold, mocking light danced in her eyes.
"That's quite the elaborate Halloween costume," she mocked, stepping closer.
"They are surgical dressings, Fallon. You read my files. You saw the operative notes."
"Oh, please," she scoffed, rolling her eyes. "I work in medical records. I know how easy it is to type up a fake report if you pay off the right low-level administrator. But you? You couldn't afford a real surgeon if your life depended on it."
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That was when she reached out, pulled a yellow plastic box cutter from her coat pocket, extended the razor blade with a sharp click, and pressed it directly against my bandages.
"You're faking it," my sister said, smiling down at me. "Then prove you're really hurt."
