PREGNANT FOR THE COLD BILLIONAIRE

Emma Parker was the only daughter of Mathew Parker. Her mother had died in a car accident when Emma was seven, and since then it had just been the two of them in a cramped two-bedroom apartment that smelled permanently of instant coffee and old carpet. She had wanted to be a doctor once, back when wanting things felt free. Nursing school was the version of that dream her father could actually afford, and she'd made peace with it the way you make peace with most things at nineteen quietly, and mostly at night, lying awake doing math on tuition and rent until the numbers blurred into something she could almost sleep on. Her father used to tease her about it. You will patch people up before you ever get to cut them open, he'd say, grinning over his coffee, and she would throw a dish towel at him and tell him to eat his eggs. It was a small joke between them, worn smooth from repetition, the kind of thing that only makes sense to two people who have built an entire life out of making do. She was walking home from her last class of the day, replaying a professor's comment about her charting technique, when her phone rang. It was her father's supervisor, her father had collapsed at work. He was at Grace Memorial. She didn't remember the bus ride there. She remembered the fluorescent lights of the ER hallway and the sound of her own shoes made against the linoleum, too loud, like she was intruding on something. Her father lay in the bed looking smaller than she'd ever seen him, an IV taped to the back of his hand, his chest rising and falling too fast. Emma pressed her palm against the rail of the bed because she was afraid that if she touched him she'd feel how cold he'd gotten. The doctor found her in the hallway an hour later. Heart failure, he told her, gently, the way doctors learn to say terrible things. He needs surgery, soon and it will run about twenty-five thousand dollars. Emma heard the number and felt her stomach drop somewhere below the floor. "How," she said. It wasn't really a question. She wasn't sure what she was asking. Where would she find that? What would she sell? She didn't own anything worth more than a few hundred dollars, and neither did her father, and the two of them together weren't worth twenty-five thousand of anything. She thought of the small gold chain that had been her mother's, still wrapped in tissue paper in her top drawer, and knew even that wouldn't make a dent. She went to see his boss the next morning, the words rehearsed and useless in her mouth. The surgery is twenty-five thousand dollars, sir. I don't have anywhere else to go. The man behind the desk barely looked up from his monitor. The company can do five hundred, he said. You'll have to find the rest somewhere. Five hundred. Emma thanked him anyway, three times, because some old instinct in her still believed gratitude was owed even for scraps, and she left his office doing math in her head that refused to add up. Five hundred from him. Three hundred in savings, hers and her father's combined, money that had taken two years to save and would be gone in an afternoon. Eight hundred dollars against twenty-five thousand. She stood on the sidewalk outside the building for a full minute before she trusted herself to walk in a straight line. She gave the hospital everything she had and promised, in writing, to pay the rest. They did the surgery on a promise, and Emma spent the four hours of it sitting in a plastic chair in the waiting room memorizing the pattern in the ceiling tiles, because it was easier than thinking about what would happen if the promise turned out to be worth nothing. It worked, mostly. Her father survived it, but surviving and healing were different animals, and the doctor's voice the following week had a new weight to it. He'll need continued medication and monitoring. If the remaining balance isn't addressed soon, I'm afraid the hospital may have to discontinue treatment, Miss Parker. I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do on my end. That sentence followed her out of the office and down the corridor and into the elevator, “ Nothing I can do, nothing I can do,” until it was just noise. She sat beside her father's bed that afternoon, watching the heart monitor blink its slow green rhythm, and let herself cry for exactly four minutes, because that was all the time she could afford to spend on crying. He was the strongest man she'd ever known. He'd worked double shifts for a decade so she'd never notice what they didn't have, coming home smelling of the warehouse floor, too tired to eat but never too tired to ask about her day first. Seeing him laid flat by his own failing body felt like watching a building come down in slow motion, one she'd always assumed would outlast her. She took his hand. It was cold, and his fingers didn't curl around hers the way they used to. "You're going to be okay," she whispered. "I'll figure something out, I promise." He didn't answer. He was asleep, or close enough to it. Her phone buzzed in her bag. A text from Lily. “Emma, you still looking for a temp job?” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist before typing back. ‘Yes. Anything.’ The reply came a minute later. “There's a private event tonight at the Royal Grand Hotel, they need extra staff to serve drinks. Pay is good.” Emma stared at the screen. The Royal Grand wasn't like the restaurants she usually picked up shifts at. It was the kind of place where the parking valets made more in tips than she made in a week, where the guests had names that showed up in the business section of the paper. She had no business walking through those doors, and some small, tired part of her almost typed back No, before she thought better of it. “I'll take it,” she typed instead. “Be there by six. They'll give you the uniform. Don't be nervous, you'll do great.” She looked at the message twice before putting the phone away. There was no version of tonight she wanted. There was only the twenty-four thousand, two hundred dollars still standing between her father and a treatment plan that hadn't been cancelled yet, and a shift at a hotel she'd never have set foot in under any other circumstances. She stood, smoothed the wrinkles out of her jeans, and leaned down to kiss her father's cheek. "I'm going to work," she said. "I'll be back soon, just keep fighting a little longer. I'm doing this for us." He didn't stir. She let herself out anyway, because there was nowhere else the money was going to come from, and six o'clock wasn't going to wait for her to feel ready.