10 – "Now girl I know the difference between right and wrong. I ain't gonna do nothing to break up our happy home." – "If You Don't Know Me by Now" – Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes
As Cameron was walking out of the cafeteria, she spied Foreman walking in. He gave her a curt nod as they passed, letting her know that he was bringing House a case file.
Foreman had adamantly refused to get in between the two angst-ridden newlyweds. But that decision did not keep him from trying to waylay House with a case so that she and Chase could talk alone. Even though she knew that he was, true to his nature, covering his own ass by doing so, she was still grateful to him. She nodded back to him as she headed for the front doors. She needed a breath of air.
She took her time, circling the building, enjoying this last gasp of New Jersey's late Indian summer. She looked down as she walked, her small shoes crushing the crisp leaves on the path and her eyes avoiding the students as they passed by. The breeze, though still warm, contained the scent of apples, dying leaves and wood smoke, all harbingers of the coming fall.
As Cameron made her way back round to the front of the hospital, she heard Chase's voice. Yet it was unfamiliar, high-pitched and ringing with laughter. It was such a long time since she had heard anything like mirth emanating from her husband. She walked quickly toward the steps leading to the parking lot, heading instinctively in the direction the sound had come from.
She looked up just in time to see Chase getting out of the back of a compact car. He turned and held out his hand, helping a leggy nurse exit the back as well. Taking the nurse's hand, he pulled, but exerted a bit too much leverage which caused her to fall into his embrace, snorting with laughter.
The driver had just exited also and turned, laughing at the other two. But her gaze went beyond her two former passengers to the steps where Cameron was standing. Cameron's dumbfounded expression wiped the smile from the driver's face as quickly as snow on a hot stove.
The other two looked up to see what had unsettled her and stopped laughing too. Cameron merely stood on the steps, waiting. Chase approached her while the two nurses chose a safer side entrance.
When he got a few steps away from his wife, he found he had lost his nerve. He briefly looked down to the pavement. When he looked up, Cameron slapped his face so suddenly and ferociously that it surprised them both.
"I'm done waiting," she said. She tore her wedding ring from her finger and threw it at his chest. "I'm done waiting for you to tell me what this is all about. Apparently you have no problem sharing your . . . self with your new friends!" The last statement came out as a hoarse cough.
"Cameron," Chase said. "I've wanted to tell you but I just didn't know how. The Dibala case . . ."
Cameron's mind roiled like a ship on a storm-tossed sea. Why was he bringing this up now?
"What? What about it?"
"It was me," he said. It seemed that now that he had chosen his path, the words tumbled over each other in their haste to be revealed. "I falsified his records. I chose to provide the wrong information. Information that I knew would lead us to give him the wrong treatment. Information that would kill him."
Cameron simply stared at him. Her husband, the man whom she had married only a few months before had just confessed to murder - cold, calculated murder. Her eyes began swimming with tears and her ears seemed to be filled with a wall of sound.
Slowly, Cameron realized that the sound she was hearing was not inside her own head. The roar was somehow familiar and throaty and coming from the parking lot. When she looked up, she saw House on his motorcycle coming to a slow, deliberate stop only yards away from where she stood.