Fate took him away.
She will bring him back.
Grief does different things to different people. Some collapse. Some go numb. Some burn everything down and walk away.
Vicky opened a textbook.
Then another. Then a journal. Then a lab. She memorized pathologies the way some people memorize prayers — obsessively, desperately, like the knowing could undo what had already happened.
It couldn't. She kept going anyway.
They started bringing her the files no one else would touch. The charts with three specialist consults and zero answers. The patients who'd been told we don't know so many times they'd stopped believing anyone could.
She approaches every case like it's personal. Because it is. Every mystery solved is the answer to a question she can't stop asking.
She built it piece by piece. Equipment that shouldn't be in a student's hands. Research that doesn't fit on any approved protocol. A space where the rules of what medicine is supposed to do give way to what it could.
Frank is still here. Monitored. Preserved. Not dead the way they said — suspended in a space between what happened and what she hasn't finished yet.
She doesn't call it resurrection. She calls it completing the research.
Every case has variables. Every obsession has collateral. These are the people in Vicky's orbit — and none of them know the full picture.
Every case brings her closer. Every answer opens something darker. Follow Vicky's work — the cases, the lab, the questions she won't stop asking.