Chapter 57: Eye check ( a spark of hope)
The small, bright light flashed right into her face again, forcing Isabella to squint as her left eye watered instantly.
"Keep looking straight ahead for me, Ms. Kingston," the doctor said.
His tone was low and gentle, but the sheer weight of his instruments, the faint smell of sterile alcohol, and the cold metal frames resting against her cheekbones made her entire body tense.
She sat stiffly in the high adjustable chair. Hands had been touching her face for the past hour, lifting her eyelids, shining focused beams into her green pupils, pressing soft rubber pads against her skin, measuring, probing, asking.
To her right, standing near the edge of the large medical bay Aaron had set up inside the estate, was Aaron himself.
He hadn’t said much since they entered the room, but the low, steady sound of his boots shifting against the floor let her know he hadn’t left her side for a single second.
"Does this light cause sharp pain, or just a dull pressure?" another voice asked, a specialist Aaron had flown in that morning.
Isabella took a small breath, her fingers tightening around the fabric of her skirt.
"Just pressure. It... it aches if you keep it there too long."
"And the halos?" the first doctor asked, moving a cold glass lens over her right eye.
"When you look toward a warm light source, do you see scattered streaks or solid circles?"
"Streaks," she murmured, her voice barely louder than a whisper. "Like lines dragging across a dark window. It’s been like that for a long time."
The two doctors exchanged a quiet word in Russian. It was too fast for her to catch, but the tone wasn’t dismissive. It sounded careful. Focused.
Isabella swallowed hard, the dry tightness returning to her throat.
She hated this. She hated the faint smell of the saline drops they had put in her eyes ten minutes ago, hated the gentle, pitying way the nurses held her wrist when guiding her from one machine to another.
When Aaron had first told her that he was bringing in a medical team to look at her, a part of her had wanted to refuse. It was easier to live in the dark when you stopped fighting it.
For years, she had built a quiet, safe wall inside her mind, accepting that her world was gray shapes and shadows, accepting that her eyes were broken beyond repair.
To sit here now, letting them shine lights into her face, opening doors she had locked away years ago, felt like inviting a fresh wave of disappointment into her chest.
She already knew how this ended. She had heard the final verdict a dozen times before her father died.
’There’s nothing more we can do, Mr. Kingston. The damage is too severe.’
"Tell me about the initial injury again," the lead specialist said, pulling the light back slightly so she could breathe easier. "Your file mentions a chemical splash during a domestic accident?"
Isabella nodded slowly, her mind reaching back into the past. "I was in the garden house... at my father’s estate. I was helping clean out the storage shelves. A bottle of old cleaning solution fell from the top rack. It shattered against the stone floor. A few drops splashed directly into my face."
"And the pain?"
"It burned," she said, her hands moving instinctively into her lap. "My father rushed me to the bathroom and flushed my eyes with cold water for twenty minutes. But by the next morning, everything was blurry. Red. Extremely sensitive to the morning sun."
"And the decline after that?"
"It was fast," Isabella whispered, the old memory bringing a familiar, heavy ache to her chest.
"At first, the doctors said it was just severe surface irritation. They gave me drops to manage the swelling. But within months, the blurriness didn’t go away. It got worse.
My father took me to three different specialists in the city. He took me to clinics down south. Every single one of them looked at the scars on my corneas and told him the same thing... that the tissue had degraded too far.
That surgery was too dangerous and would likely leave me completely blind."
She paused, taking a slow, shaky breath. "They told him all we could do was manage the dryness and the inflammation. Keep the eyes comfortable. That was all."
"The drops," the doctor said, turning his head slightly toward the tray beside him. "The ones you brought with you."
Isabella reached into her pocket instinctively, her fingers brushing the smooth plastic bottle she kept with her everywhere.
It was a habit born out of years of fear, having those drops close by was like a security blanket.
Whenever the burning in her eyes started, whenever the dry pressure felt like knives behind her brow, those drops were the only thing that offered relief.
She had kept them in her coat when she fled her home, kept them tight in her palm during the flight on Aaron’s jet, and kept them on her nightstand ever since arriving in Russia.
She handed the small bottle over to the specialist.
"You use these daily?" the doctor asked, holding the small bottle up to the light.
"Twice a day," Isabella answered. "Sometimes three times if the weather is dry or if my eyes burn."
The lead specialist looked at the label, then turned his gaze toward the secondary doctor. A brief, subtle stillness settled over the room.
Aaron stepped forward, his heavy presence cutting through the quiet. "What is it?"
The doctor didn’t look up immediately. "The formulation is quite dense for standard lubricating drops. It contains a high concentration of specific steroids meant only for short-term post-operative recovery."
Isabella blinked, confused. "My doctor back home told me I needed them indefinitely to keep the tissue from scarring further."
"Using steroids of this strength for years without breaks increases intraocular pressure," the doctor said calmly, placing the small bottle into a clear glass dish on his desk.
"It can cause severe dryness, chronic discomfort, and actually prevent the outer layer of the cornea from ever truly healing itself."
"What are you saying?" Aaron asked, his voice low, steady, and sharp.
"I am saying," the specialist said, turning fully to face them, "that I would like to send this sample to our lab downstairs for a complete chemical breakdown. In the meantime, Miss Kingston, I am taking you off these immediately. We will switch you to a clean, pure saline rinse."
Isabella felt a sudden knot of anxiety tighten in her stomach. "But... those drops are the only thing that stops the burning. If I stop taking them—"
"You’ll use the rinse," Aaron interrupted smoothly, his voice leaving no room for argument as he looked down at her. "If they need to check what’s inside it, they check it. Everything concerning your health gets looked at."
She swallowed her hesitation, nodding weakly. "Okay."
The specialist adjusted his glasses, picking up a folder resting on the stainless-steel tray. He looked over the notes, his thumb tracing the edge of the paper before he turned back to Isabella.
"Miss Kingston," he began, his tone dropping into something far more serious.
"When you came to us today, you were expecting to hear that your condition is irreversible. That is what your previous medical records stated."
Isabella braced herself, pulling her shoulders back, waiting for the familiar blow. "I know."
"Your condition is certainly complicated," the doctor continued. "The scarring on your corneas is deep, and the long-term irritation hasn’t helped."
Aaron’s eyes narrowed as he watched the man. "Can you restore her sight?"
The doctor hesitated for a fraction of a second. "I cannot answer that today."
Isabella’s heart gave a sickening drop. ’There it is,’ she thought, a cold emptiness settling into her chest. The same gentle brush-off. The same polite way of telling her to give up.
"I cannot answer that today," the specialist repeated, his voice firm, "because I refuse to give you a guess until we perform high-resolution optical scans tomorrow morning. But I ’can’ tell you this, Miss Kingston..."
He stepped closer, resting his hands lightly on the back of his chair.
"...I do not believe you should have ever been written off as untreatable."
The room went dead silent.
Isabella froze. Her lips parted slightly, but no sound came out. The quiet words seemed to echo off the cold walls, bouncing inside her head like a sharp bell.
’Not untreatable.’
She felt Aaron’s eyes shift to her face, felt the intense, quiet shift in his posture beside her, but she couldn’t move.
A tiny, terrifying spark of hope flared somewhere deep in her chest, a spark so fragile and dangerous that it terrified her far more than the darkness ever had.
Before she could process the weight of what he had just said, a light knock sounded at the door of the medical room. A nurse walked in carrying a tablet, handing it directly to the lead doctor.
The doctor looked down at the screen. Aaron didn’t look surprised; he already knew what was on that screen.
He had ordered the full panel himself the moment she arrived, wanting every blood test double-checked by his own trusted staff. He stood perfectly still, waiting for the formal confirmation to be delivered to her.
The doctor looked up from the screen, his expression softening as his gaze shifted from Aaron back to Isabella.
"Miss Kingston," the doctor said gently. "The results from your blood panel came back from our lab."
Isabella blinked, still trying to catch her breath from the news about her eyes. "My... blood work? Is something wrong?"
"No," the doctor said, stepping closer to her chair. "Not wrong. But there is something else we found."
He took a quiet breath.
"Your pregnancy test came back positive."