Dr. Samuel Trenton never complained about being married to an entirely impossible woman. He had known she was impossible when most of their university class had, when she shouted down a professor over the number of ribs in a female skeleton. She had calmed down over the years from a fireball of anger to an ember still flickering with brashness, but her impossibility remained firm.
When he had left the house, he had made his wife swear she would leave her study and salvage a few hours of sleep. When he returned from the urgent visit to a child suffering from scarlet fever, she was still pawing away at stacks of mouldy textbooks liberated from the depths of the obscure stacks of most of the medical universities in and surrounding London.
"Filly…" If anyone else in the world had called Dr. Felicia Trenton "Filly", she likely would have knocked them out and surgically constructed them a new orifice of some kind. "You need sleep now."
"The symptoms aren't so uncommon…" she all but moaned, resting her forehead on the smooth cherry wood desktop. "Why can I not figure this out…?"
Samuel picked up the patient's file again, frowning deeply. Fresh eyes often broke a case, and this was no exception. He knew his wife's condition, though she did not, but this chart proclaimed a male. "Filly, you've been having many of these same symptoms before you ever met your patient. More insomnia, of course, and less vomiting. You cannot diagnose him because, as impossible as it seems, I believe the two of you suffer from the same disease."
Felicia sat up straight, eyes blinking tiredly. "What is it, then? Spit it out, Samuel!"
"My darling, when was the last time you bled?"