2025-09-29 01:51:53
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Chapter Four Hundred and Ninety Eight
They went in at eleven-thirty.Not through the kitchen corridor this time, because the kitchen corridor was the route the household used and the household, reduced to a night presence of one staff member, would be moving through it at unpredictable intervals. Felix took him through the garden entrance, the one used for deliveries in the summer months and now locked but for which Felix had obtained a key from the estate manager under a pretext that was thin enough to trouble Lukas and solid enough to have worked.The estate was different at night, quieter in ways that large houses are quiet when the people who animate them in the day are absent or sleeping, the specific quality of rooms that have been occupied and are waiting to be occupied again. Lukas followed Felix through the dark with his bag against his side and his clinical mind running ahead of his steps, reviewing the chelation protocol and the supportive treatment sequence he had decided on during the train journey, the admin
Chapter Four Hundred and Ninety Seven
He called Elise from the corridor outside Vera's laboratory, standing against the wall with the report in his hand, because processing what the report meant would take longer than Henrik had and the call needed to happen first.She answered on the second ring. He could hear from the quality of her answer that she had been waiting for it, the kind of waiting that does not put the phone down between checking it."Tell me," she said."Thallium," he said. "It is in his system at concentrations consistent with several weeks of ongoing exposure. It is also present in the medication samples. The laboratory finding is unambiguous — the thallium in the pills was deliberately introduced, not environmental contamination, not pharmaceutical error. Someone put it there."The silence on the other end lasted four seconds, which was long enough that he checked the connection."Elise," he said."I heard you," she said. Her voice had the quality of someone who has received information their mind was al
Chapter Four Hundred and Ninety Six
Felix took him through the kitchen corridor at a pace that was not quite running but was the fastest walking that could be managed without producing sound, past the housekeeper's pantry and the laundry room with its smell of warm linen and through a door that opened onto the estate's rear terrace, which was sheltered from the front approach by the house's own bulk.They stood on the terrace for a moment, both breathing more carefully than usual, the sound of the front door opening and Clara's voice reaching them faintly from the other side of the building."She is early," Felix said, his voice barely above a whisper. "She is never early on Thursdays.""It does not matter," Lukas said. "I have what I need."Felix looked at the bag Lukas was carrying and then at Lukas's face, reading both."Tell me it means something," Felix said. "What you found in there. Tell me we were right to do this.""I found enough to confirm that the testing is necessary," Lukas said. "That is what I can tell y
Chapter Four Hundred and Ninety Five
Lukas kept his hand over Henrik's and said nothing for a moment, because the moment required the quality of someone receiving important information rather than the quality of someone managing it, and Henrik deserved to be heard before he was responded to.The grip on his arm remained. The old man's eyes stayed on his face with the watchfulness that was costing him, that visible effort of a mind fighting to remain present long enough to say what it needed to say."Tell me what you experience," Lukas said, keeping his voice level and quiet, the voice he used when the patient needed to feel the room was safe. "Start wherever feels right."Henrik took a breath. "After meals," he said. "It begins after meals. Not always. But when it is bad, it begins after meals." He paused, gathering the next sentence. "Or after the medications. The morning medications. There are times when I take them and within an hour I cannot think clearly. I cannot feel my hands properly. And the sickness in my stoma
Chapter Four Hundred and Ninety Four
He told Elise he would come.He told her the conditions first."If at any point Clara returns or the situation requires me to be identified as providing medical consultation in a way that could create professional or legal exposure, I will stop," he said. "I can observe. I can ask questions. I cannot examine him in any way that constitutes formal medical assessment without his proxy's knowledge.""I understand," Elise said."And if he is not lucid," he said, "I will not make any clinical assessments based on a non-lucid conversation.""Yes," she said."Tell me what Henrik said exactly," he said. "The full sentence."She told him again and he held it again, the Brandt rather than Bauer, which was not his name and had not been his name but was the name Elise's family had always used for him in the years when he had been part of the family, the name that existed in the household's history in the way names do when they have been used long enough to become embedded in a place's vocabulary.
Chapter Four Hundred and Ninety Three
He listened without interrupting.Elise spoke for twenty minutes, the account organized in the way she organized things when she had been thinking about them for a long time and had decided to present them completely rather than selectively.The episodes were the first thing she described.Not a steady decline. A week of significant deterioration, then four days of improvement clear enough that the family had allowed themselves to believe the trajectory had reversed, then a collapse worse than what had preceded the improvement. The neurologist had noted the episodic quality in his report and had attributed it to the natural variation of early dementia, which Lukas had read and noted as a characterization that was possible and was also the characterization of someone who had decided the diagnosis and was fitting the observations into it."The pattern of improvement followed by worsening," Lukas said. "Do the improvements correlate with anything observable? Changes in his environment, v
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