Chapter 7
7 day I received my physical examination report, the colleague in charge of distribution noticed something
unusual.
“Valerie White, what a lovely name. Here’s your report,” he said, handing it to me.
I thanked him, but as I reached out, the report slipped from my fingers and fell to the ground.
To my horror, the page revealing my blood type splayed open, face up.
My heart sank. I was RH–negative, commonly known as the extremely rare blood type. That rare designation, embedded in my very being, always made me cautious, wary of others.
I bent down to pick it up, but my colleague was faster. He got to it first.
The moment he retrieved it, his expression froze. He had seen it.
His name tag dangled slightly as he stood–a small rectangular badge that read “Lloyd Dunce, HR Department.”
I suddenly remembered: he had been the one who interviewed me and processed my onboarding.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, probing.
He handed the report back to me, his finger tapping a spot at the bottom right corner.
“Why is there a checkmark here?”
“A checkmark?”
I took the report and examined it carefully. Sure enough, there was a faint black ink mark in the corner. The ink had long since dried, and the mark was discreet, tucked into the margins as though it had been deliberately hidden.
Curious, I grabbed a few other reports nearby for comparison. None of them had the same mark.
Was it an error? A coincidence?
I recalled the medical report from my pre–employment health check six months earlier. Digging it out, I flipped through it, and there it was–the same subtle mark in the same spot.
Something clicked in my mind. I immediately called the middle–aged police officer handling my case.
He studied the reports for a long time before speaking.
“This report has definitely been tampered with,” he said with certainty.
He pointed to the page containing my blood type. “See the creases here? Someone flipped through this page specifically, and the way it fell open earlier isn’t a coincidence–it’s been manipulated.”