Stronger Wattys2019

The scalpel felt wrong in my hand, cold and alien. "Sarah, we're ready. It's time." My husband, Dr. Mark Johnson, stood beside me, his voice a smooth, confident hum.

This was the moment. The surgery on my own father. The moment that, in another life, had destroyed me completely. I dropped the scalpel.

"I can't do it," I said, my voice surprisingly steady. A flash of memory, vivid and real, flooded my mind: an orange jumpsuit, camera flashes, a "Guilty" verdict. I remembered dying alone in a prison cell, my name a synonym for malpractice and murder. A monster who killed her own father on the operating table.

Why was I reliving this? I'd changed things. I hadn't operated. I'd deliberately injured my hand, smashing it against a metal basin to avoid that fate. Yet here I was, surrounded by public scorn, branded a "psycho doctor" and a "murderer" by a baying mob, all orchestrated by Mark and my mother, Eleanor. They even produced a manufactured video of me botching the surgery-a doppelganger, a staged performance meant to frame me.