All Chapters of My Wife Betrayed Me. The System Chose Me : Chapter 71
- Chapter 80
102 chapters
CHAPTER 71
The nurse on the shift when he arrived said his name wrong.Not badly wrong. Just enough to make it hurt.“Cael-en,” she called, eyes already drifting back to the tablet in her hand.He stood anyway.The waiting room smelled like disinfectant and old upholstery. Someone had spilled coffee near the intake desk and wiped it badly. The stain had spread into the grout like a bruise that never healed. Caelan had been standing against the wall for fifteen minutes, hands loose at his sides, weight balanced the way it had learned to balance when floors were unstable and exits mattered.The nurse looked up, surprised that someone answered.“Yes,” he said.She frowned, checking the screen again. Her lips pressed together. Not suspicion. Confusion. The small kind that came when something did not match expectation.“Follow me,” she said, and turned without waiting.He followed.The corridor lights hummed overhead. Too bright. Designed to flatten faces, bleach emotion, make everyone look equally t
CHAPTER 72
Everything continued unmoored, no special sunlight or auspicious weather. Traffic kept its rhythm outside the hospital. Horns flared and faded. A vendor argued with a customer on the corner, voices rising, then settling into resignation. Somewhere a generator coughed into life. Ordinary noise. Civilized noise. The kind meant to convince people that continuity was real.Caelan stood at the threshold of Lyra’s room and let the lie pass around him.Glass framed her like a specimen. Tubes traced careful paths from her small body to machines that hummed with borrowed certainty. Her hair had been brushed back, still too fine, still refusing to stay neat. The bruise at her collarbone had faded to a yellow-green shadow. Someone had taped a cartoon sticker to the monitor. A star with a smile.He took one step inside.The room smelled different from the corridor. Warmer. Human. The antiseptic thinned here, diluted by soap and plastic and the faint metallic note of blood. Caelan moved to the ch
CHAPTER 73
The first person to smile at Caelan wore a volunteer badge.She stood near the elevators with a tray of paper cups, steam lifting faintly from them. Coffee. Cheap. Overbrewed. Her smile was practiced, wide enough to disarm, not wide enough to invite questions.“Long night?” she asked.Caelan slowed but did not stop. He caught his reflection in the stainless-steel doors behind her—leaner now, eyes darker, posture unfamiliar even to himself. He nodded once, a neutral acknowledgment, and kept walking.The woman watched him go.Not like someone offended. Like someone counting.Two nurses passed him, laughing quietly about something trivial. Their voices dipped when they noticed him, then resumed too quickly, a fraction too loud. A man in a suit stood by the window pretending to check his phone, thumb scrolling without intent. Security lingered at the far end of the hall, hands relaxed, eyes not.The hospital had filled itself with masks.Caelan moved through them as if through water. Not
CHAPTER 74
The hospital didn’t erupt into chaos after the realization. It adjusted.Caelan noticed it first in the way sound thinned out. Conversations didn’t stop; they softened, smoothed into something cautious. Shoes still squeaked against polished tiles, but the rhythm changed, spacing itself wider, more deliberate. Even the fluorescent lights seemed steadier, less prone to flicker.Control had entered the room.A nurse who had been laughing quietly with a colleague straightened, smile evaporating as she turned away. Two orderlies appeared at the corridor junction, not blocking passage, just… present. Their hands rested loosely at their sides, palms open, ready.No one announced anything. No alarms. No shouting.The system didn’t need spectacle.Lyra lay against Caelan’s chest, lighter than she should have been, her breath warm through the thin cotton of the hospital blanket. Each rise and fall felt measured, like her body was negotiating with itself.He felt the shift before anyone spoke.
CHAPTER 75
The door wasn’t meant to open.Caelan understood that the moment it did.It wasn’t marked. No signage, no access panel, no warning strip along the frame. Just a seam in the wall that split apart with a muted hydraulic sigh as he passed, revealing a corridor that did not belong to the hospital he knew.The air changed first. Cooler. Filtered differently. It carried no antiseptic bite, no human residue. It smelled processed.Wrong.He stopped.The system did not warn him. That, more than anything, tightened something low in his chest. Silence from it meant either permission or consequence deferred.Behind him, the ward remained ordinary. Nurses moved. Machines beeped. Life continued in fragile increments. Ahead, the corridor absorbed light instead of reflecting it, matte walls swallowing the glow from overhead strips.This place wasn’t for patients.Or families.Caelan stepped through anyway.The door slid shut behind him without sound.The corridor wasn’t long, but it felt compressed,
CHAPTER 76
The elevator doors opened on the fourth floor and no one stepped out.Caelan felt it before he understood it. The hesitation. The recalibration. The subtle way a space rearranged itself around a person who had become inconvenient.A nurse stood by the wall pretending to scroll through a tablet that had already dimmed. Two orderlies stopped their conversation mid-sentence. Neither looked at him. Not because they were afraid, but because they had decided he was no longer neutral.He walked past them anyway.The hallway smelled the same—faintly of disinfectant and burnt coffee. Someone had wheeled a cart too quickly and left a thin streak of water that reflected the ceiling lights in broken lines. Caelan stepped around it without slowing. He had learned long ago that pausing invited interpretation.Lyra’s room was at the far end, glass-walled, private. He could already see the silhouette of her small body under the blanket, the slow rise and fall that anchored him more reliably than brea
CHAPTER 77
She was not meant to be there.No one else was meant to be. That was the first thing Caelan noticed. Not her face, not her posture, but the error of her presence. The corridor outside the records wing had a way of enforcing anonymity. People passed through it like shadows, heads down, hands full, eyes trained on destinations rather than truths. She stood still.She met his gaze.Most people glanced, then adjusted. A quick calculation, a silent decision to remain uninvolved. This woman did neither. Her eyes held his without challenge, without sympathy. Just recognition. As if she had been waiting for a confirmation she already believed in.Caelan slowed. Not stopped. He had learned the cost of stopping.“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, keeping his voice low.Neutral. Words chosen for safety rather than honesty.“I know,” she replied. Her voice carried no apology. “Neither should you.”That earned a second look. She was older than him by a few years, maybe more. Not polished. Not car
CHAPTER 78
Records can bleed and one is about to bleed. The archive did not announce itself.No sign. No plaque. Just a narrow service corridor that smelled faintly of metal and rainwater, ending in a door the color of old bone. Caelan passed it twice before stopping. The third time, he pressed his thumb to the scanner without looking at it, as if muscle memory might still carry weight.It didn’t.A red line pulsed once. Judged him. Rejected him.Caelan exhaled through his nose and stepped aside as a woman in a municipal jacket pushed a cleaning cart past him. She did not slow. Did not glance up. Her badge swung forward, just enough.He reached out, gentle, and palmed it against the scanner as she passed.Green.The door opened with a sigh that sounded too much like relief.Inside, the air changed. Cooler. Drier. Preserved. Rows of cabinets lined the room, tall and windowless, each marked with codes that meant nothing to anyone without clearance or patience. This was where histories were thinne
CHAPTER 79
Caelan returned to the city without ceremony.No announcement preceded him. No alarms followed. He crossed the outer checkpoints on borrowed clearance, his name unspoken, his face half-remembered by systems that hesitated before letting him pass. The hesitation mattered. It meant the erasure had cracked, even if it had not yet fallen apart.People stared anyway.Not openly. Not with accusation. Their eyes slid toward him and away again, as if acknowledging him too clearly might invite consequence. A man selling coffee paused mid-pour when Caelan stepped into line. A woman near the transit gate adjusted her coat and moved two steps farther from him. Recognition spread like a quiet infection, subtle but unmistakable.He did not belong here anymore.The city had learned to function without him, and it resented the interruption.By the time he reached the civic corridor, the rumors had already arrived. He heard fragments as he passed through security lanes that pretended not to see him.“
CHAPTER 80
Caelan expected resistance. Security sweeps. A quiet detainment dressed up as procedure. What he received instead was delay. The systems lagged. Approvals stalled. Requests bounced between departments that suddenly insisted they did not have jurisdiction.It was not mercy.It was uncertainty.He felt it as he moved through the civic district, the way people hesitated before making eye contact, the way authority recalibrated when it failed to find its footing. Power did not like being looked at directly. It preferred ritual. Distance. The comfort of precedent.Caelan had broken precedent.By the time he reached the hospital again, the ripple had spread. The front desk clerk verified his credentials twice without comment. A security officer started to stop him, then checked his screen and stepped aside without explanation.The doors opened faster than they should have.Lyra was awake when he entered her room.She was sitting up, legs folded beneath the blanket, eyes alert in a way that