At St. Mary's Hospital, Room 304, Marcus Pearson was having what he would later describe to anyone who asked as the worst week of his life, and he would not be exaggerating.
He lay in his hospital bed in a private room he had upgraded twice since his admission, until it looked less like a place people came to recover and more like a hotel suite with medical equipment. There were flowers on the windowsill that a woman had sent, and a bottle of whiskey on the bedside table that his friends had smuggled in. But that wasn’t the highlight. Marcus lay still on the bed with broken ribs and a fractured wrist and a collection of bruises that had passed through the dramatic purple stage and were now settling into a sickly, humiliating yellow-green. His nose had been set, and thankfully, his teeth w
