Me Before You

PART 34: Piece a Fragment

🅈🄸🄽 🄿🄾🅅

After I explained everything to Lee, a deep silence filled the space between us, almost suffocating in its weight. He stared at me, taking in every word without speaking right away. A long breath escaped him and he rubbed his face, as if trying to process what I had just shared. His eyes met mine again but there was something unreadable in them.

Lee's lips parted, as if he was about to say something but they closed again, the words caught in his throat. His mind seemed tangled, struggling to form a response.

Desperation took over me, pushing me closer to him, as if trying to pull the answers from his silence. "Lee, I know this all sounds crazy and yeah, you can call me crazy. I don't blame you if you are having a hard time believing it. But I'm begging you, I need your help. You are the only person I can turn to, the only one who might be able to help me find War," I pleaded, not caring if I sounded pathetic.

"No, Yin. You are not crazy," Lee responded. "Folk has filled me in on the details about the painting. And I can tell that there's something odd about it."

He then took a file from his briefcase. He turned the pages until he found what he was searching for, then angled the file toward me, indicating a photograph. "This...this is Mike Panitan, the person Dr. Thu introduced the artist behind the painting, right?" Lee inquired, his eyes fixed on me, searching for affirmation.

I nodded. "Yes, that's him," I confirmed, my heart racing.

He sighed. "Yin, six months ago, Mike was my patient. He had been under my care for the past two years before he was transferred to Dr. Thu's supervision."

"But the puzzling issue here is that Mike experiences a substantial impairment in his fine motor skills. This means he faces significant difficulties in tasks that require precise hand movements, like holding a pencil or manipulating small objects, let alone creating intricate paintings like the one you and Folk showed me," Lee explained.

His statement sent a wave of disbelief through me. The possibility that War could still be out there flickered in my mind, mixing with the ache in my chest.

"So...that-that's mean..."

"Yes, they were lying to you," Lee responded with a heavy sigh.

My vision blurred as tears welled in my eyes. I had always believed that War was the true artist behind that captivating painting. Now, knowing the doctor lie about who really made something more off, making me suspect that there was something important being hidden from everyone.

Lee retrieved another document from his stack of files. He displayed the paper in front of me. "Take a look at this, it's a record of the patients at BNH Hospital who contributed their work to the Gallery Center this year," he explained calmly.

I directed my attention to the document. "I painstakingly analyzed every detail. Our team submitted around 10 paintings for display this year. But as you can see..." He flipped to another page, his finger guiding my gaze to the relevant section. "The painting you show to me, under Mike's name, has an empty data. When you examine the profiles of other artists, there's something strikingly different about Mike's page."

He shifted his focus to a side by side comparison. "For each painting submitted, there's usually an appendix, a supplementary document, accompanying the artist's name. But, when it comes to Mike's entry, there's an absence of any such appendix," Lee pointed out. "This deviation is intriguing in itself. It's as if they wanted to keep his association with the painting discreet."

Lee's finger rested on the page, drawing my attention to a single image positioned at the bottom. It depicted the painting, set against the backdrop of a room. "Now, this room," he continued. "It's a solitary space, a single room. They tried to show that Mike did his painting in his room but the problem is this room doesn't belong to Mike. So, I think-I mean, this is just my guess, this room is the real owner of the painting," he said.