They Chose Her Over Me—Then Begged Me to Remember Them Chapter 05
The three of them stood in front of me.
The woman’s eyes were red-rimmed. She reached out a hand.
“Rosalind, that’s enough now. Mom’s here to take you home.”
I looked at her hand.
“Who are you?”
Her hand hung frozen in the air. She forced a laugh.
“All right, all right. I know you’re upset. After all that time locked up, of course you’ve got a temper.
She reached out again, trying to take my hand.
I flinched back.
Not because I was scared. Because I didn’t understand.
I really didn’t know who she was.
Why was she trying to grab my hand?
The man beside her crouched down, leaning in close, pointing at his own face.
“Rosalind, it’s me. Your brother!”
I studied his face. Looked at it carefully for a long moment.
Then shook my head.
He stood back up, his expression darkening.
“Rosalind, how long are you going to keep this up?”
I said nothing.
I didn’t know what “this” meant.
I’d only told the truth.
That’s when a girl about my age stepped out from behind them.
She looped her arm through the woman’s and said softly:
“Mom, maybe she’s still upset… she probably still holds it against me, from before.”
She glanced at me, then dropped her gaze and murmured:
“Rosalind, if you’re still mad at me, you can hit me back if you want. Just don’t be angry at Mom and
everyone…
The woman sighed and patted the girl’s hand.
Then turned back to me, and something in her eyes had changed.
“Rosalind. Della’s being this understanding, and you still won’t let it go?”
“Can’t you just be a little more reasonable?”
The man’s brow furrowed too.
“Mom, I told you. She’s acting. She kept it up for a hundred days, what’s one more scene?”
The other man had stayed silent the whole time.
Now he stepped forward and set the flowers down in front of me.
“Rosalind. It’s me. Miles.”
He crouched to my eye level.
“You said you wanted to see the Northern Lights in Iceland. Remember?”
I looked at him.
Iceland. Northern Lights.
The words came out of his mouth, and I understood them-but I didn’t know what they meant.
Finally I shook my head. “I don’t know you.”
His jaw tightened.
“Rosalind, do you have any idea what you’re saying?”
“I already bought the tickets. I was going to propose to you in Iceland. To make up for everything you went through these past few months.”
He stared at me, his voice going hard.
“And now you’re telling me you don’t know who I am?”
I said nothing.
Because I didn’t know what to say.
He suddenly stood, backed away two steps, his face twisting.
“Lam so disappointed.”
He turned and shouted down the hall.
“Doctor! Get over here!”
“She’s still not right. I don’t think she should be discharged!”.
Footsteps came from down the hall.”
Dr. Whitman walked over, looked at me, then at them.
“What exactly is wrong with her?”
The man pointed at me.
“She doesn’t recognize us! Not a single one of us!”
Dr. Whitman was quiet for two seconds.
“Of course she doesn’t recognize you.”
“Her prefrontal white matter has already been removed.”
The hallway went silent.
“No legal guardian came to complete the paperwork before the deadline of her mandatory observation
period.”
“Per protocol, she underwent a prefrontal lobotomy.”
No one spoke.
“In simple terms-the neural connections in her brain responsible for memory, emotion, and cognition
have been severed.”
“The procedure is irreversible.”
Dr. Whitman looked at me.
“She won’t recognize any of you again.”
“She won’t remember anything from before, either.”
“But you can rest easy, she has no aggression left in her whatsoever.”
“She won’t hurt anyone again.”
“Because she no longer even understands what ‘hurting someone’ means.”
The woman’s knees gave out. She
“Irreversible… what does that mean?”.
The man grabbed Dr. Whitman by the collar.
“How could you people do this procedure! Who authorized it?!”
“We never signed any surgical consent form!”
Dr. Whitman didn’t pull away. He just looked at him.
“You did sign it.”
He turned and walked into his office, coming back out with a document.
He flipped to the last page. A signature at the bottom.
Mom’s name.
“Admission consent, clause fourteen.”
Dr. Whitman pointed to the bolded line.
“Should the mandatory observation period expire without the legal guardian completing discharge
procedures, the hospital reserves the right to administer necessary medical interventions per treatment protocol, including but not limited to surgical procedures.”
“This consent form. You signed it yourselves.”
The document slipped from the man’s hand and drifted to the floor.
“You knew. You knew this the whole time!”
Over at the nurses’ station, a young nurse stood up.
She gripped her pen, her eyes already red.
Everyone turned to look at her.
“She spent three months’ worth of points on ten minutes of phone time.”
“She called every single one of you. Every one.”
Her voice was shaking,
“She told you. Surgery was scheduled for next Wednesday.”
