Chapter 6 - A Performance in Tears
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The paramedics arrived like a storm of flashing red lights, shouting voices, and heavy boots on marble. They swarmed around me, cutting away my ruined clothes, strapping me to a rigid board, and shouting vital signs back and forth across the foyer.
Through a haze of fading consciousness, I saw Evelyn standing near the front door. She had one delicate hand pressed dramatically against her chest, tears streaming down her powdered cheeks as she spoke to the household security team and the arriving medical crew.
"She was always so clumsy in the final trimester," Evelyn sobbed to a paramedic, her voice trembling with manufactured grief. "I told her to stay off the stairs. I begged her to rest. But she was so headstrong..."
It was a masterpiece of deceit. If I hadn't lived through the push, I would have believed her myself.
They loaded my stretcher into the back of the ambulance. The doors slammed shut, cutting off the view of Armitage House and Evelyn’s weeping face. Inside the cramped vehicle, a paramedic worked frantically over my body, pressing oxygen masks to my face and barking orders.
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"Stay with us, Clara!" a nurse pleaded, holding my cold hand as the ambulance bounced down the winding road. "Your baby needs you! Keep fighting!"
The sterile white lights of the ambulance ceiling blurred into streaks of light, and then the world vanished completely into blackness.
