THE PATIENT
The Patient – Prologue
Theme: the violence of willful blindness. How much truth are we willing to sacrifice for love?
Settings: port Amber, Port Amber, a fictional gray coastal city. St. Dymphna’s Hospital. The ghost town of Blythe in the northern hills.
Genre: dark romantic suspense•••••
Mystery:What really happened in Blythe? Where is Clara? And is the man in Willa’s care a survivor, a savior, or a monster?
Tags: gothic romance, missing child, anti heroine protagonist, forced proximity••••
® FINESSA.
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The Map
The man who would become John Doe was not yet a man without a name when he walked into the gas station. That would come later, in the blood and the screaming and the silence that followed. For now, he was just a man in a dark coat, collar turned up against a rain that hadn’t started yet, buying a map he didn’t need and a coffee he wouldn’t drink.
The girl behind the counter was young. Nineteen, maybe twenty. She had a smudge of blue ink on her chin from a pen that had leaked in her apron pocket, and she smiled at him with the automatic, weary brightness of someone working the graveyard shift in a town of two thousand souls.
“Going far?” she asked, nodding at the map.
He looked at her. Not through her, the way most customers did, but at her, with an intensity that made her hand pause over the register. His eyes were a color she couldn’t name. Not brown. Not green. Something in between that seemed to shift in the fluorescent light.
“I’m looking for someone,” he said. His voice was low and rough, like a road that hadn’t been paved in a long time.
The girl—her name tag read Beth—felt a small, cold finger trace its way down her spine. She told herself it was nothing. Just the draft from the cooler. Just too many true crime podcasts on her phone.
“Well,” she said, forcing another smile, “hope you find them.”
He didn’t smile back. He just picked up his map and his coffee and walked out into the night. The bell above the door chimed a thin, tinny note. Beth watched through the glass as he climbed into a truck that had seen better decades, its taillights flaring red in the darkness like two tired eyes. Then he was gone, swallowed by the long, empty road that led north, toward the hills, toward the place that would, in less than forty-eight hours, become a crime scene.
Beth would see his face again, three days later, on the news. A blurry photograph. A headline that used words like massacre and sole survivor and person of interest. She would sit on her couch, still in her work apron, and press her hand to her mouth. She would remember the map. The coffee he didn’t drink. The way he had looked at her, as if he was memorizing her face for a reason she couldn’t yet understand.
And she would remember the name of the town printed on the map.
Blythe.
But the news didn’t mention Blythe. The news mentioned four bodies and a man who couldn’t remember his own name. It mentioned a nurse in a city hospital who had taken a special interest in the case.
It didn’t mention Clara.
It didn’t mention the child.
And Beth, staring at the television with her cold coffee shaking in her hands, would realize that the man had never bought the map for himself. He had bought it for someone else. Someone who was still out there. Someone who was waiting.
Intriguing right?
