I trusted him completely.
That was why his next words frightened me.
“Daniel,” Dr. Weller said quietly, “there’s something we need to discuss.”
I looked at him.
“Am I getting worse?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
Instead, he closed the chart.
“No.”
I laughed nervously.
“No?”
He shook his head.
“Your condition isn’t progressing.”
I stared at him.
“Then why have I been taking all these medications for ten years?”
His face went pale.
“That’s what I’m trying to understand.”
The room suddenly felt smaller.
I slid off the examination table.
“What are you saying?”
Dr. Weller stood and walked toward the window.
“I reviewed your original records last night.”
“Why?”
“Because something didn’t make sense.”
He turned around.
“The diagnosis you were given when you were twenty-eight was based on laboratory results from another patient.”
For several seconds, I couldn’t process the sentence.
“Another patient?”
He nodded.
“There was a file-matching error at the specialty clinic.”
My mouth went dry.
“You’re telling me I was never sick?”
“I’m telling you that the diagnosis you’ve been living with for ten years was not supported by your original records.”
I sat back down.
All those years.
All those pills.
All the birthdays I had treated as possibly my last.
The vacations I had refused.
The jobs I had turned down.
The plans I had never made.
Everything suddenly felt unreal.
Then I thought about Emma.
My fiancée’s daughter.
She was eight years old.
When I met her, she was five.
At first, I had been terrified of becoming attached to her.
I told myself I would never make promises I couldn’t keep.
But children don’t care about your plans.
Emma started leaving drawings on my workbench.
She called me when she lost her first tooth.
She asked me to teach her how to fix a bicycle.
And when she was frightened during thunderstorms, she would quietly knock on my bedroom door.
“Can I stay here?”
I always said yes.
Then, two years earlier, my fiancée Sarah and I decided to get married.
There was only one thing I kept thinking about.
Emma.
I didn’t want her to grow up wondering whether I was really her father.
So I asked Sarah something.
“If something happens to me, what happens to Emma?”
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