"What are you babbling about?"
Georgia demanded furiously. Robert grabbed her hand.
"Don't listen to her bullshit."
Sierra, though, started cackling madly.
"Would I still lie to you about such a thing at a time like this? You can't even imagine everything Robert's been through in the past year. Why else would he have been so thankful, even believing me to the point of promising to marry me? I appeared at his side in the guise of a savior all along, and he couldn't have been anything other than grateful.
"But all that acting and he still caught on. I wanted to ask you, Robert – before you planned to fake your death, where did I go wrong?"
Georgia tensed, fearful that Sierra was telling the truth. She looked nervously at Robert.
Robert smiled faintly at Sierra.
"Because you're not Wesley's biological mother. You made a misstep there, which led me to start suspecting you."
"It was for that reason, huh."
Sierra chuckled self-deprecatingly.
"I guess someone who's not biologically related will never be able to act as loving as a real mother. No wonder you found something off. But so what? You can shut me up here, or even take me someplace to be tortured. You won't be any better off, Robert Simpson. I don't believe you're unaware. Your body's already been through all sorts of human experimentation. It's run ragged. I don't believe you can live long enough to be with Georgia for the rest of her life."
Sierra laughed aloud, with a vicious gaze that was both hateful and pitying as she looked at Georgia.
But when she turned that gaze towards Robert, there was only mockery there, as if sneering at Robert's victory, and the time he didn't have to enjoy said victory.
Georgia had always trusted her instincts. At this moment, though, she was terrified of them, because she believed Sierra was telling the truth.
But if it was all true, then what was wrong with Robert's body?
She didn't know at all. Georgia looked in horror at Robert.
"Is she telling the truth?"
Sierra howled with insane laughter as Robert took Georgia's hand.
"We'll talk about it outside. Don't bother with her. She's gone nuts, and she's just spouting deranged exaggerations."
Robert tugged Georgia out of the basement. A freezing wind there seemed to rustle at her and goosebumps rose on her skin. Georgia felt icy, and a sheer, consuming fear was spreading across her being.
Coming out from the basement, the winter sun shone on her, but she felt none of the warmth, only a bone-chilling cold.
Seeing Georgia grow paler and paler, Robert wrapped his arms around her and kissed her forehead.
"Don't get hung up over Sierra's words. She's just taking it out on you and trying to intimidate you."
"Robert, we're husband and wife now. You can't lie to me about anything. No matter how difficult it is or how much hidden troubles you have, you shouldn't keep it from me. The first time you faked your death, I can look over it, but if something like that happened again, and you kept it from me deliberately, I really wouldn't be able to forgive you. I'm willing to face any problem with you, but I'm not going to be content being kept in the dark like some fool."
Georgia, trembling with fear, looked at Robert standing before her.
Still as gentle, tall and handsome as the man she'd known before.
Georgia ran the events of the year over her head, her lips quivering.
"You must have suffered this year. I know the things you've been through must have robbed you of all your dignity once. It might be too hard on you to have you list them all. I won't force you to speak about them. I wanted to ask you something else. When you first had your incident, your leg wound hadn't fully healed yet. The original plan was to go through a few more neural surgeries, then stand again slowly through physical therapy. That was a long plan that needed a whole year, but you disappeared after the first surgery. You kept on vanishing this year, and I don't believe Sierra would have gotten anyone to help you with surgery, much less get a bunch of peak neural surgeons together to operate on you. Ivan couldn't have been able to find out where you were, so they definitely didn't get anyone to operate on you. But here you are, standing up before me now. Tell me, how did you regain the use of your legs? Please, tell me the truth."
Georgia's eyes reddened. Sierra's talk of human experimentation resonated through her mind.
From how Sierra's hate worked, that was definitely no normal lab, but the sort of sick, underground human research lab.
The type of labs that put human bodies through all sorts of psychopathic tests. Georgia couldn't even picture what Robert had been through.
She felt like the world's biggest idiot right now. How was it Robert could stand up?
Why hadn't she ever considered that?
But Sierra suddenly exposing that made Georgia feel she was coming up on the answer.
On her end, she did research into lung cancer, in the same direction as biopharmaceutical research. In their type of regular lab, any experiments were of course only conducted on plants and animals, and bacteria or fungi in petri dishes.
As for human experiments, without sufficient testing to confirm minimal effect on human bodies, regular labs wouldn't even dare test out their drugs on people.
Even if the drugs reached the live trial stage, that required a lot of volunteers for bedside study, along with constant corrections over a year or two before the drug could hit the market and become available for normal people.
But underground labs weren't like that. They didn't experiment with lab rats or study the reactions to disease as regular labs did with animals and plants. They went straight to human testing, and through the radical methods of those mad scientists, they refined the drugs step by step with figures from live experimentation.
Some rich people, to protect their own lives, often assigned secret objectives in those labs. When Georgia was in school, she'd even received that sort of invitation, but she'd refused them outright. She didn't want to go against her conscience.
But now, Georgia found that she was broaching that dark side of medicine.
Since Robert had already been in that sort of laboratory for a while, she suspected that the fact he could stand up now had something to do with his experiences a year ago with human experimentation.
"Do I look sick to you, standing here in the pink of health? Yes, I spent some time in a lab that does human testing, but after a while, that lab exploded. They did run some experiments on me, but it didn't take long, and almost everyone died after the lab exploded. I was heavily injured, then Sierra saved me. Don't worry, she's just trying to scare you."
Georgia's tears fell. She looked at Robert with red eyes, her voice full of anguish and despair.
"Stop lying to me. You're standing up straight now, and you're still saying it has nothing to do with that lab? I don't believe Sierra found a surgeon for you after she saved you. Besides, you lost your memory, and you still can't explain how you lost it in the first place. What did you go through in that lab? Maybe even you can't remember. Robert, you can't just treat it like it hasn't happened. Come to the hospital with me right away for a full checkup.
"You promised you'd be with me forever. How could you keep such a thing from me?"