Revenge16 min read
My Stethoscope, Your Lies
ButterPicks13 views
I am Nicole Dorsey. I deliver life. I fix ruptures. I stitch bodies back together when the world is careless. I never expected to have to stitch together my own ruined life.
"It was 3 a.m.," I said, eyes on the ceiling light in the on-call room. "Two ectopic surgeries in four hours. I thought the night had given me enough."
"Then what happened?" Lexi Sjostrom asked from the far side of the small room. Her voice was soft like a light knock.
"The phone rang." I paused, remembering the EMR alert in my pocket. "Calloway, from urology, asked for a consult. 'Couple brought in by ambulance,' he said. 'Male fell in the shower, female pregnant fainted. Both stable now.'"
"You thought it was routine?" Lexi guessed.
"I thought so." I rubbed my ears. "Then I saw his face on the gurney."
"Foster?" Lexi's question was sharp.
"Yes." I opened my mouth and closed it. "I almost dropped the pager."
"How—" she started.
"I had been told Foster was on a business trip." I swallowed. "He was not."
The corridor smelled of antiseptic and late-night fatigue. We walked together. Emergency lights blinked. A porter pushed a gurney with a woman in her thirties. Her hand fisted the sheet. She shouted, "Please, save my husband!" and then she was pushed aside by the triage nurse.
There were no scripts for this.
"Who's the obstetrician?" Lexi asked.
"You."
I stepped into the resuscitation bay and pulled the curtain so we were alone with the man on the stretcher. He was in a white bathrobe, knee swollen, clutching it like it was the center of a collapsing world. He raised his head when I lifted the curtain, and he saw me.
"Nicole?" Foster breathed, then blinked like he had seen a ghost. "I—"
"You lied," I said.
He grinned—one of those foolish, exhausted, self-justifying grins. "I told you I was at the other hospital. I said I would be back on Sunday."
"You told me you loved me last night over video." I kept my voice steady. "You told me to rest. You got two surgeries' worth of silence from me. You slept with someone else."
"Nicole—" He tried to say my name like it would open a door.
"Don't." I leaned on the counter. "Don't call me that."
He reached out with one hand, uselessly, for excuse. "It's the first time. She—"
"First time?" I spat. "There is no first time."
"Please," he begged. "Please listen."
I did not let him finish. I had a decision to make faster than the heart monitors beeped. Rage flared like heat, but I compressed it into a flat, clinical patience.
"If you want to survive this marriage, you're going to need me to be seen as the forgiving, poor wife," I said. "So you will leave now, you will heal, and you will not find me on social media with this picture of you two. If you value your life, you will do what I say."
He tried to protest. "Nicole, I'm in pain. Let me—"
"I will take the phone in your robe pocket." I said it like I was ordering an assistant. "And I will keep it until I decide the next step."
He protested again, fumbling, and I took the phone and slid it into my scrub pocket. The porter wheeled them away. The woman screamed once more, "Please, save my husband!" over and over.
Later, in the staff room, I sat with Foster across from me. He had a hand pump in a plastic bag to help manage his pain. He tried to stand upright in the way men who think charm forgives everything do. "Nicole, listen," he began. "It's complicated."
"Is it?" I asked, gentle. "Why is a pregnant woman shouting 'save my husband'?"
"She thought his knee was bad. She fainted because she was pregnant and panicked." He used the world's oldest lines.
"Where do your texts go when they say 'baby' and 'love'?" I asked.
"I—" His voice broke. "I told her our divorce was final."
"She thought you were divorced."
He looked away. "It was complicated. She didn't know. She has been through a lot. It's not what you think."
"Not what I think?" My laugh was brittle. "Foster, your toothbrush spends nights in two places. Your heart apparently has a second home."
"Nicole, please, I never meant to hurt you." His eyes were red.
I let him keep talking because sometimes the truth is spoken in the gaps of excuses.
"How long?" I asked finally.
"Three months," he admitted.
"Then why did she say fifty days?" I asked. "Why would she lie about pregnancy dates?"
He shrugged. "She was nervous. She didn't know."
"She didn't know?" I repeated. "She came in shouting for you."
He closed his eyes and muttered, "She wanted to keep this. She said—"
"She said what?" I pressed.
"She said she wanted to keep the child." He looked at me like I should be understanding.
"Keep it," I echoed. "For whom?"
He offered no answer I wanted.
I wasn't raw then. I was coldly methodical.
"Calloway," I called later that night, "have you seen the ultrasound?"
"Nic, it's an odd one," Calloway Thomas said over the phone. "The radiologist flagged the fetal image as more advanced than the reported dates. HCG is high. Someone's math doesn't add up."
"Bring me the records," I said.
I spent the next hours believing in one thing: knowledge is the blade I would use.
When I opened Foster's phone later—quietly, in the chaos of the ER, while the hospital slept—I found the things I feared. Messages full of "baby," "can't wait," "we will be a family." A photograph that was not just one night. Money transfers over weeks. A picture of a document that looked like a divorce certificate—crisp, too convenient, likely faked, but made to convince.
"She is young," I told myself. "Maybe she is a simple fool or maybe she is worse."
I found something else in the records that night. A file from the obstetrics unit: Bianca Sanchez, age 25, claims fifty days, HCG 250,000, ultrasound showing fetus shaped like a three-month pregnancy. The mismatch stung. Someone was hiding something.
I went to the nurse station and asked Lexi to help. "Keep it quiet," I said simply. "Arrange a room for Bianca. Single bed, 53. Keep the chart open."
"Are you sure?" Lexi's eyes were narrow, curious.
"Yes," I said. "Do it."
Bianca arrived that morning with a crease of calculated sorrow. She wore make-up that had been re-applied after crying. She asked me the same drama: "Is my husband okay?"
I watched every twitch of her face. She seemed practiced at fragility. But inside her face was a hard, rehearsed control.
"You said fifty days?" I asked while putting on gloves.
"Fifty days," she said placidly. "I only found out recently."
"Let's do a scan." I smiled like a doctor and not like a woman burning.
The scan said otherwise. The fetus looked almost three months. The HCG numbers said otherwise. I took copies.
I spent nights reading texts, and days arranging like a surgeon setting clamps. My plan was not to explode in fury. My plan was to let them eat each other and ensure I got everything in the fallout.
"Why are you doing this?" Foster asked when I gave him a cup of coffee in the staff room, the first week after the ER incident. He kept the bitterness thin.
"Because if I burn them now, I lose everything," I said. "If I wait, I win. If I let them believe they can have everything, they will show you and the world their true faces."
"You're playing with people's lives," Foster accused.
"People who are cheaters and manipulators don't get to call what I do playing," I replied coldly. "They should have thought of other people before they took what isn't theirs."
"You think you can take everything?" he said, voice rising.
"I will take what is mine," I said. "And I will make sure they are exposed."
My plan unfolded in quiet steps. I arranged for Bianca to be monitored. I did the clinical work with tenderness, showing a bedside manner that covered the blade beneath. I secretly ordered additional imaging and tests through the hospital system I knew like a pulse. I checked her renal ultrasound and found stones—stones she had treated lightly. I placed dietary suggestions and then coaxed certain indulgences when appropriate. I watched them feed each other illusions.
"She's so young," Foster told me one evening, the guilt like a vein showing. "She told me her father left. She told me she was scared."
"And you took her fear and used it to sleep with her," I said. "You made her believe a lie."
"You want forgiveness," he said plaintively.
"I want justice," I corrected.
The first confrontation came small and private and perfect. There was a family birthday for Karla Archer, Foster's mother. I drove them to tears with a gift—a heavy gold bracelet that made Karla's eyes shine. I smiled through every smile. "Mom, you deserve it," I said. "You've always treated me like a daughter."
Karla's fingers were warm when she clasped the bracelet, and she looked at me with pride as though I had been the daughter she had hoped for.
"You're a good daughter-in-law," she said to Foster. "We're lucky to have you, Nicole."
Foster's small, contemptuous sigh made me angrier than any blow. He thought he had me.
"Karla," I told her later in the kitchen, quietly, "something's wrong. Foster has been staying overnight at a colleague's place. I think you should come with me."
"Come with you where?" Karla's voice fluttered.
"Hospital," I said. "I need you to meet someone."
We arrived at the ward and the day became loud. Bianca was there, fragile, makeup streaked, her hair a mess. Foster walked in with the stiff pride of a man who thinks he can handle any outburst.
"What is this?" Karla demanded.
Bianca threw herself at Karla. "Please, don't be angry," she began. "I never meant—"
"She said our son promised her a house," Foster hissed under his breath.
"House?" Karla's voice sharpened. "He promised you a house?"
"That's what she said!" he snapped.
"Foster," I said to the room without pleading, "you have told her we were divorced."
"I did," he tried to justify. "She wants to keep the baby."
"Show the contract," Karla demanded. "Where is this proof?"
"He's lying," Bianca wailed then, but there was a hard circular edge to her crying now. "He showed me a document!"
"Foster, whose phone is that?" Karla pointed to the corner of the room, where my white coat had masked the item. "Whose messages are these?"
I had prepared for this. I placed Foster's phone on the little table and opened a thread. The room went quiet like a clinic when the surgeon calls time. The messages were there. "Love," "baby," "wait for our house," "sign the papers," and a crisp image of a divorce certificate forged with ease.
Bianca's jaw dropped. "That's not how—"
"It was not a real divorce," I said. "He faked a paper. He faked trust."
She looked at Foster like she had been struck. He faltered. "I—"
Karla slapped him then, a quick sharp sound. "How could you? How could you lie to me? To your wife?"
"Mom—" Foster tried to get between us, but his body slumped like a man who knows the ground has fallen away.
"How dare you stand there," Karla shouted. "You stood there and lied about our family and our legacy."
Bianca clutched her swollen belly and sobbed. Nurses came in, staff gathered, and the ward filled with the murmurs of patients and visitors. Witnesses, I thought, counting them like inventory.
"Stop!" Bianca suddenly screamed, wild. "You shouldn't—"
Karla slapped her too, then, a cut across a face already red with tears. "Don't you point your filth at me!" Karla screamed. "You hooked my son! You used him!"
Bianca reeled as if struck with more than a hand. She protested, desperate, "I didn't know! I thought—"
"You thought!" Karla barked. "You thought you'd get everything and throw him away! You thought our name would be a stepping stone!"
Bianca's composure crumbled. She grabbed at Foster's sleeve. "Foster! Say something!"
He looked at her like a child who had been shamed in school.
"Nico—" he tried to speak to me, to plead. "I didn't—"
And there, in that public, bright hallway, the first layer of their pretenses shredded. People from adjacent beds looked up. A porter stopped pushing a tray. A visitor on a chair folded his newspaper and walked closer. Nurses whispered. The room acted like a small town; everyone close enough to hear the scandal.
"Tell them," I said quietly to Foster. "Tell them you faked a divorce paper."
He could not. He mumbled about "pressure" and "money" and "it won't matter." He had an audience now, and his bravado condensed into tiny, brittle threats.
"No," Karla said loud enough to be heard at the nurses' station. "I will not stand for this. Call the family lawyer."
"Call security," Bianca screamed in a sudden, animal panic as if the sharks were circling. "He tricked me!"
I watched the changes cross faces. "Shock, denial, then rage," I narrated inside my head like a lecture. Foster's eyes went blank, then bright, then frantic. Bianca's barking protests slowed to watery pleas. Karla's face alternated between crimson and white.
"Do you hear yourselves?" Calloway, who had come to the doorway, said in that calm surgeon's voice. "This is a hospital. We will not have violence." He stood there like a magistrate.
"You're the one who should be in here," Karla said, not moving.
This was only the first public storm. It was not the ultimate punishment. It was the first peel of shame.
The second, heavier punishment would come publicly and last, and it would be deliberate.
Weeks later, the hospital conference room was booked for a meeting. The board had called staff and family. I had filed for divorce and had documents ready. I had notified HR and the hospital lawyers. I had copies of bank transfers, chat logs, and the ultrasound discrepancies. I had the forged "divorce" image and a timeline showing when Foster had given Bianca access. I had an investigator's report showing Bianca's earlier pattern of taking men for money, and I had a folder that showed a bank trail.
"Why are we all here?" a nurse asked, looking between the senior staff and the legal representative.
"Because truth matters," I said simply.
I had arranged it so that the meeting would be public. Staff from three departments filled the chairs—doctors, nurses, admin. Family members of both sides were allowed in. Media was not invited, but the hospital was a small town and news finds warm places.
"Mrs. Dorsey will speak," the hospital director said.
I stood, the world narrowing to the point of my voice. "This is about trust," I said. "And about truth. I am a physician. I uphold life. I do not tolerate deception."
"Foster," I said, and the man rose like a puppet jerked by an invisible hand. "You gave a fake document to Bianca to make her believe you were free. You wrote to her for months, sent money, promised a home. You told her we were divorced. She relied on you. You made her build a future on a lie. Then you used my work as cover."
He wanted to remove his wedding ring. He didn't.
"Why did you do it?" I asked.
His face shifted. "I wanted a child," he said. "I thought—"
"You thought you could have both." I felt the room breathe, inhale. "You thought you could have me and have someone else."
Bianca, in the front row, tried to look hurt but looked hollow instead. "I was told—" she began.
"Shh." Karla's hand flew to her mouth like a silencing.
I opened the folder and laid out the chat timeline.
"Here," I said. "Text at midnight, 'I love you.' Transfer of money on the tenth. Photo of a powerless divorce paper. HCG values inconsistent with reported days. And the ultrasound that indicates a longer pregnancy."
Foster's face changed in stages like a slide show: smug to shocked to denial to anger to collapse. The room's chatter rose.
"What is this?" Bianca asked, voice thin.
"Proof," Calloway said, calm but firm. "We are medical professionals. We verify records."
A young nurse, Dayana Schuster, stood up. "You used hospital time and a sick woman for your lies," she said. "We are here to help people, not to be a stage for your life."
"Shame on you," another nurse, Hanna Stewart, said. "You played with a woman's life."
Faces turned in the crowd. "I thought—" Bianca tried to say.
"Enough." Karla's voice cut through like a gavel. "You took our name. You conned my son. You ate away at our family. I will not have it."
Bianca's response collapsed into cries. "I didn't know he was married!" she kept repeating, as if the repetition could absolve her.
"You chose a man who told you not to look deeper," I said. "Either way, your pattern is clear." I showed the earlier divorce papers from the college years. The room reacted. "You have been compensated in court for previous divorces. You know the system."
Bianca's posture collapsed. The color drained. "No—" she whispered. "I never said—"
A cluster of nurses began to murmur. "I remember you," a young administrator said. "I saw posts online. They came to our unit today."
"What are they saying?" a janitor whispered to a nurse. "Did she trick more men?"
At that, the room pulsed with a new energy—vindication for some, vindictiveness for others.
"Security will escort you out," the director said finally. "And HR will investigate your conduct at this facility."
"Wait—" Bianca tried to rise but a security guard reached for her arm.
Her expression squeezed through stages: defiance, confusion, denial, then terror.
"Please," she begged suddenly, clutching at her dress. "Please don't fire me. Please—"
"People will see your history," someone said. "Word travels."
"You will be reported to licensing," Calloway added. "And your employer will review any conduct that involves patients. This is not a small thing."
People in the room began to react. "That's right," a midwife said. "This isn't acceptable."
A cluster of med students took out their phones. "This is teaching," one whispered. Others recorded. The video would spread. Social media took sharp interest, and that would be another public punishment.
Bianca's face crumpled. She tried to plead with Foster with a look, but his eyes slid away from hers like someone who realized what he had done had no remedy.
"How dare you," Karla spat as the guards led Bianca out. "How dare you come into a family's house and try to take their son and their name."
Bianca sobbed, "It wasn't like—"
"You used a child to get what you wanted," a nurse said, angry. "You used a baby like a tool."
The guard pushed the door and she left in a flurry of humiliating sobs and shame. People in the hall watched. Phones recorded. Some applauded. Some whispered. The room felt like a courtroom. Foster's face had gone gray.
This was the public punishment stage — the humiliation spread, the court of public opinion closing in, the professional consequences assembling like a slow, inevitable storm.
The weeks that followed were worse for them. HR pulled files. Foster was suspended from his position because of moral conduct clauses at his workplace. Bianca was dismissed when her employer learned about her conduct and the videos circulated. The hospital's ethics panel recommended that staff who had enabled deception be reprimanded.
"What about legal?" Foster asked me the day he came crawling. "Nicole, give me another chance. Let me keep things."
"You lied to me for months," I said. "You faked a paper to have an affair and to sell a dream. You took my money. I will have justice."
"You said you wanted forgiveness," he said, ragged.
"I wanted justice," I told him.
We went to court. The judge listened to the timeline, the forged documents, the bank transfers, the doctor's testimony about fetal age and HCG. Bianca's employer testified to pattern-of-behavior. I testified about the deceit and the pain. Foster watched, face hollow, muttering, and then suddenly furious, then small and pale. Bianca came and left under a photographer's camera that had been tipped off by an ex-colleague.
When the judge made the ruling, the world slowed. "Given the clear evidence of deception and financial transfers and the marital misconduct of Mr. Foster Bridges, the court awards full marital assets to Nicole Dorsey and orders Mr. Bridges to leave without access to the marital home. All funds transferred to Bianca Sanchez are to be returned." The gavel hit wood. The courtroom murmured.
Foster froze. He looked like he had been drained of blood. He tried to rise. "Your honor—"
"No," the judge said. "Order stands."
Foster's reaction was a theater of the guilty: frantic then stunned, then bargaining, then collapse. He lunged at me in the parking lot the way a wounded animal lunges. "Please," he begged, hands outstretched. "I'll make it right. I'll get the money back. I'll—"
"Get away," I said.
He begged. He pleaded. The security guard led him away while the courthouse gathered around. People who had known us in the hospital came; some crossed the street to stare. Phones recorded his begging. The scene was ugly and public. His friends did not intervene. His mother watched nearby, rigid and full of sorrow. She had been betrayed by her son and she felt it physically. Foster's expression slid into a new stage: shame, then realization, then collapse. He was left with nothing but the clothes on his back and the truth people could see.
Bianca's fall was public in another way. Her old friends posted evidence of her prior behavior. Her colleagues testified. Men she had used turned up videos and receipts. The clinic that had employed her fired her for dishonesty. People who had once praised her beauty now whispered. A man in a grocery store recognised her and hurled an insult. Her online accounts filled with criticism. She tried to sue for defamation and lost when the evidence was laid bare. The city became a cold place.
I sold the house eventually. I did not keep it to spite anyone; I kept it because my life was mine to rebuild. The hospital recommended me for promotion because of my clinical judgment in the emergency case and for the ethical courage I showed. The board made a point of saying they supported staff who protected patients and who went through complex moral cases with integrity.
The end came quietly, not with fireworks but with a small, precise action that meant more to me than any applause.
"Why did you sell the house?" Karla asked one afternoon when she and I were drinking tea at her kitchen table.
"Because I need fewer ghosts," I said. "Walls remember damage. I want a clean slate."
Karla reached for my hand. "I am proud of you."
I looked down at my wrist where the old pager scar had faded into a pale line under the skin. The stethoscope I had taken from my pocket all those months ago hung like an amulet in the clinic locker. The monitor in the emergency bay somewhere beeped a steady rhythmic note that had become a lullaby.
"You saved yourself," Karla said softly.
"No," I replied. "I saved the life I was supposed to live."
The last time Foster tried to contact me, he came to the hospital and kneeled—publicly—outside the staff entrance. He begged for mercy. I did not stop. I did not look back. I let the sliding doors close between us.
In the months that followed, Bianca's life crumbled. She could not find stable work. She vanished into small jobs and then into fragility. People whispered she broke and that the city swallowed her. Foster left for another state, took a job far from the hospital, and his mother visited me once to apologize quietly for her son's wrongs.
When the director called me three months later with the news that a senior post was open, she said, "No one else speaks so plainly in public and in court. The board was impressed."
I took the job.
The hospital monitors keep time in their steady beeps. When the ward is quiet, I sometimes sit in the on-call room and listen to the tiny tick of the pager and the steady beep of the monitor. I slide my stethoscope over my heart like a woman who listens to her own pulse after a long run.
"Do you regret how you handled it?" Lexi asked once, leaning on the doorway.
"I regret the pain," I admitted. "I don't regret the truth."
"You were so calm," she said. "You could have lost everything."
"I nearly did lose everything." I touched the scar under my hairline. "But I learned that patience is a scalpel. You can cut slow, clean, and deep."
The city healed in its own way. Karla planted a rose bush for her birthday that summer. I waited until the stems were thick and green and then, one afternoon, I took a pair of pruning shears and snipped the last withered petal from the bush and put it into a small envelope.
"I don't want your roses to sting me again," I told Karla, and she laughed softly.
On a bright Tuesday, I closed the oncology clinic's afternoon shift and walked past the old room where the birth monitors hummed. I hung my coat in the locker and pressed my hand to the stethoscope at my neck. The monitor in Room 12 made its small beep, a consistent "tick-tick" like a tiny clock.
I thought of the nights of surgery, of the forged divorce paper that had started everything, of the phone in a robe pocket, and of the boy who wanted a child without choosing to be faithful. All of them had names. All of them had been quietly, publicly unmasked.
"Keep your voice," I told myself. "Keep your hands steady. Keep your stethoscope clean."
I took a breath, slipped my keys into my pocket, and walked out into sunlight that felt like a promise. The monitor's steady beep followed me down the corridor as if the hospital itself had given me a small, private benediction.
The End
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