The Year I Stopped Being His novel Chapter 312

The moment the words left his mouth, Vincent lunged forward, raising his hand and slapping Garrison hard across the face.

The sharp, heavy crack echoed across the rooftop, making Quinn shriek in terror. Garrison's head snapped to the side from the force.

"You ungrateful bastard!"

Vincent shook with rage, his hand still suspended in the air, fingertips trembling violently. "Are you out of your mind?!"

Garrison slowly turned his face back.

On his left cheek, the red imprint of a hand starkly contrasted against his pale skin. He touched the corner of his mouth, glanced at the smear of blood on his fingertips, and then shifted his gaze back to Vincent.

Then, he smiled.

It was a shallow, jarring smile, like a crack forming on a frozen lake to reveal the pitch-black, bottomless abyss below.

"Vincent," he said, "you know exactly what Rosemary has done all these years."

"When she forced Sloane into the contaminated water to fetch a pen, where were you? All those years she isolated Sloane, suffocating her with relentless psychological abuse—where were you?"

He shot Vincent a look so eerily calm, almost amused, that it nailed the older man to the spot, rendering him completely speechless.

Beyond the railing, Rosemary's body slowly slid down the iron bars.

Her knees buckled first, leaving her entire weight dangling from the hand gripping the railing. Eventually, her grip gave out, her fingers uncurling one by one until she slumped onto the narrow, eight-inch ledge. She leaned back against the iron bars, her legs stretched out in front of her, bare feet dangling precariously over the edge.

Her eyes were wide open, yet entirely hollow. Tears had decimated her makeup, leaving foundation and eyeshadow pooled into the deep crevices around her eyes and mouth. She looked like a dismantled puppet, nothing more than an empty shell.

A successful encapsulation meant The Vitas Protocol was finally ready for clinical application. Though it was still a long way from mass production...

It was enough to treat a specific patient. Someone with terminal brain cancer.

"I understand. I'm on my way," Garrison said, abruptly ending the call.

Slipping the phone back into his pocket, he cast one final glance at the woman slumped on the ledge, then turned and strode toward the stairwell without looking back.

*

Garrison caught the earliest flight to San Francisco.

As the plane pierced through the clouds, he leaned against the window, watching the rolling sea of white. His fingers mindlessly traced the edge of his seatbelt buckle. Five years. From the moment he took that faintly glowing blue sample tube from the Antarctic ice, through thousands of failed lab experiments, enduring countless raids by the National Bio-Safety Agency—the moment he had been waiting for was finally here.