Page 112 of Spiced!

“I should have at least waited for the second—”

“Brendan.” I got the word out. “Shut up and let me have it. I’m having a moment. It’s a big one. You did that.”

So he shut up.

He let me have it.

He pulled me into him, and I went. I put my face in his neck where it was warm and smelled like him and a little like bad diner coffee, and I stayed there for a long time, not performing, not reading a room, not being fun—just being held by a man who had watched me tell the truth with my body and then handed it back to me with words.

And I didn’t reach for the bag.

I didn’t even remember, until much later, that I owned one.

Chapter 31

Brendan

The footage from the enclosure was time-stamped and organized chronologically. I had watched so much of it that I knew Marisol better than some patients I’d been seeing for years. I’d memorized her gait, her preferred corner of the enclosure, and the specific way she shifted when she was comfortable versus when something was off. I knew her behavioral baseline the way I knew the baseline of any long-term case. Which was why I noticed, on a Thursday morning with cold coffee and eleven minutes before my next patient, the thing I hadn’t noticed before.

It wasn’t in the episode footage. It was in the footage before the episode.

I leaned forward.

The pattern wasn’t in what Marisol did. It was in what she stopped doing.

In the ninety minutes preceding each seizure, she stopped engaging with the enrichment items on the left side of the enclosure, the ones closest to the keeper access point. She moved exclusively to the right, not dramatically or urgently, just a quiet, consistent withdrawal from one side of her space.

I pulled up her bloodwork alongside the footage. Then I pulled up her pulmonary imaging. I sat with them for a long moment, the three things together. It felt like I’d been standing too close to a Monet, and now that I was taking a few steps back, the image was resolving into a complete work.

“Next patient is in room—”

“I need a minute,” I snapped at Marcus as I snatched up the phone and called Dr. Reyes.

She answered on the second ring. “Dr. Davis?”

“There’s a behavioral withdrawal before each episode,” I said, without preamble. I felt almost breathless, as though I’d just run a marathon. “Left side of the enclosure, ninety-minute window. Have you changed anything on that side recently? Keeper schedule, enrichment rotation, anything structural?”

There was a pause. Longer than her usual pauses. All I heard was the clicking of her pen.

“We installed new ventilation on the left wall,” she said slowly. “About three months ago.”

“Three months ago.”

“The episodes started—”

I could almost see her freezing in place, her pen half clicked.

“Three months ago,” I said.

“The airflow change,” she said. “Oh my God, Brendan—”

“Combine that with her existing pulmonary sensitivity, and we produce seizures. I don’t think the vent is causing the episodes directly, but it’s likely creating the preconditions. She’s been managing it behaviorally, moving away from the airflow, which is why the episodes are intermittent rather than constant.” I paused. “She’s been trying to tell us something’s wrong with that vent for three months.”

Dr. Reyes’s next words sounded more like thoughts in progress than anything directed toward me. “We can modify the ventilation output, reroute the airflow.”

“Move her to a different enclosure temporarily while you do it,” I said. “Whichever is faster, but I want to be clear, this is still only a theory. I think it’s a very strong theory that fits the imaging, the bloodwork, and the behavioral pattern in a way nothing else has.” I paused. “But it’s not a confirmed diagnosis until we make the changes and see the episodes stop.”

“You want to observe her after she’s moved to a new enclosure?”