Violet is taking a while to settle in to our new life but she seems okay. She doesn’t seem to have any close friends yet but she did join an after-school art club and they meet twice a week. I asked her if she ever misses Jordyn and Cora and she just shook her head and said not really. I check her phone and scan the bills to see if she calls or texts one of them, but she hasn’t. I sneak into her room when she’s at school and flip through her sketchbook, looking for drawings of Joseph Wither or tall grass or railroad tracks, but only find pictures of Boomer and attempts at anime. I’m relieved and hopeful and grateful. It’s time for us to make new memories, good memories.

Dr. Madeline Gideon September 14, 2018

Dr. Madeline Gideon

September 14, 2018

When we found Cora sitting in a pool of blood pulling out her stitches I was truly stunned. The nurses rushed in and whisked Cora away with Mara Landry right behind her. Cora was taken into surgery and the surgeons once more had the task of putting her back together again.

I remember standing in the middle of Cora’s hospital room, my hands and knees covered with her blood and Jim Landry standing in front of me, his face red with rage. “This is your fault!” he spat. “You were supposed to help her! You were supposed to help my family!”

Kendall was sitting on Cora’s hospital bed, crying anguished tears. I tried to step past Mr. Landry to go to Kendall, to comfort her, something her father should have been doing.

“No way,” he said, blocking my way. “You stay the fuck away from her. You stay away from my family.”

“She’s upset,” I told him the obvious. “You should go to her. She needs you.”

“No!” He stepped toward me, forcing me to move backward until my back was against the wall. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. Get out.”

After Cora, I reviewed her case file over and over. I read and reread until the pages were dog-eared and smudged. I thought I would be able to pinpoint the mistakes I made, learn from them and hopefully never make them again.

And for a while I did just fine. I moved on. That’s what we do as doctors. We assess and diagnose and treat and then move on to the next patient. The problem was, I didn’t move on. I kept doubting myself. I’d make a diagnosis, then hesitate and change my mind. It got to be that I couldn’t make a move without consulting with a colleague. I was losing sleep. I wasn’t eating. And I wasn’t good at my job anymore.

So I resigned. I quit because a little girl named Cora Landry and a fictional entity named Joseph Wither got into my head.