Patient 4471

Synopsis
Vida Preston is twenty-two, an ordinary schoolteacher, when inexplicable weakness drives her to seek help. Her doctor, Grey, a man convinced he can spot anxiety masquerading as illness, repeatedly dismisses her symptoms across several years. He sends her home with quiet irritation, convinced nothing is wrong. By the time Vida discovers blood and lumps, the damage is done. An MRI finally reveals stage four breast cancer that has spread beyond treatment. Medical dismissal didn't cause her disease, but it stole the time required to save her life. Vida curses Grey, vowing he will regret his negligence.
As her body fails, her world collapses. Her fiancé, Daniel, unable to endure her dying, begins an affair with her best friend, Hailey. Having lost her career, relationship, and future, Vida's grief hardens into an exact plan for vengeance. Grey begins receiving threats. Soon, his home is ransacked, and his young sons, Bura and Jack, are abducted. DNA strands left at the scene belong to Vida.
The police corner Vida at a cliffside where she holds the boys. Declaring that his sons must pay the debt her body already paid, she jumps, dragging the children down with her. Bura and Jack die in the fall. Vida survives, permanently paralyzed from the waist down. She serves six years in prison before being paroled, leaving Grey and his wife, Romina, to navigate a shattered marriage and a grief-stricken aftermath.
The novel is structured in three parts: Part One is Grey's first-person perspective, where Vida is merely a clinical name on a medical chart. Part Two shifts to Vida's first-person voice as she reclaims her name and reveals the brutal reality of those overlooked years. Part Three switches to an objective narrator, examining the devastating weight of a tragic, permanent trade.