Divorced and dying;now watch me rise

Chapter 7

I did not tell Audrey about the phone call when I got back to the apartment.

Not because I did not trust her. I trusted Audrey with my life, which was not a metaphor anymore. But Audrey had spent the last three weeks watching my face for any sign of a fever or a bad joint flare, and if I told her an anonymous source from Veridex wanted to meet me at a coffee shop on Saturday, she would insist on sitting three tables away with a pair of sunglasses and a bad attitude.

I needed to do this as a journalist, not as a patient with a chaperone.

I sat at the kitchen table with a glass of water and my laptop open beside the blue notebook. My fingers were stiff from the morning chill, but they bent when I told them to. That was still new enough that I tested it three times, closing my hand into a fist and opening it flat against the wood.

"You're smiling at your knuckles," Audrey said.

She dropped her work bag by the door and kicked off her heels. She looked tired, the specific kind of corporate exhaustion that came from spending six hours in marketing strategy meetings with people who used words like synergy without laughing.

"They bend," I said.

"They better bend. I'm paying Dr. Nakamura's clinic with real fundraiser money." She walked over, pressed the back of her hand against my forehead out of pure habit, and nodded when she found no heat. "Did he say anything about the blood draw?"

"Thirty-six percent kidney function," I said. "Up from twenty-nine."

Audrey stopped reaching for the kettle. She turned around slowly, her hands resting on the edge of the counter.

"Thirty-six," she repeated.

"He said it will fluctuate. He told me not to throw a party."

"Steven Nakamura does not know how to throw a party," Audrey said, though her eyes were shining in a way she tried to hide by turning back to the stove. "He probably celebrates birthdays by reading a medical journal in a slightly warmer chair. Thirty-six is a real number, Nora. That is seven percent more of you fighting back."

"It's a start," I said.

"It is an insult to Damien Green's legal timeline, is what it is." She poured water into the kettle and set it to boil. "Speaking of people we do not like, Jessica asked about you today."

I looked up from my screen. "Jessica from your team?"

"Jessica Fowler. She came by my desk after the budget review. Asked how you were holding up, asked if you were still staying in the spare room, asked if the experimental treatment was genuinely working or if the fundraiser was just keeping you comfortable."

A small, quiet alarm bell rang somewhere in the back of my mind.

I had met Jessica twice during my marriage. Once at a holiday dinner Audrey dragged her to, and once at a charity auction Damien had sponsored when he was still trying to impress local real estate developers. She had spent twenty minutes that night talking to Damien about his golf swing.

"What did you tell her?" I asked.

"I told her you were resting and that my spare room has better lighting than her apartment." Audrey leaned against the counter and crossed her arms. "Why? You think she's being nosey?"

"I think people don't ask specific questions about experimental treatments unless they want specific answers." I wrote Jessica's name in the corner of my notebook, draw a neat square around it, and looked back up. "Don't tell her about the thirty-six percent."

"I don't tell Jessica anything important. Last week she told me she liked Vivienne Cole's podcast on emotional boundaries. I nearly threw my coffee cup at her keyboard."

I smiled, but my mind was already turning gears. If Damien was trying to track my medical progress without calling me directly, Jessica was an easy bridge. Damien hated surprises. He especially hated surprises that cost him money, and an ex-wife who refused to die on the schedule his lawyer had drafted was becoming an expensive variable.

"I need your printer tonight," I said.

"Help yourself. Just don't print thirty pages of pharmaceutical jargon again. My yellow ink is already screaming."

I spent Thursday evening and the entirety of Friday morning doing what Damien had spent six years telling me was a waste of my evenings: I built a timeline.

A real investigative interview never started at the table. If you walked into a room waiting for a source to tell you what mattered, you were already behind. You had to know the shape of the room before you turned on the light.

I searched professional networking registries for women who had left Veridex's corporate headquarters within the last eight to ten months. I filtered by departments that handled regulatory affairs, clinical trial compliance, and internal auditing.

Fourteen names came up.

I crossed out six who had relocated out of state immediately after resigning. I crossed out three more who had moved straight into rival pharmaceutical firms with higher titles—people who left for a promotion rarely called journalists from blocked numbers.

That left five women.

I pulled up corporate press releases from three years ago—the exact year my joints had started swelling, the year Dr. Pullman had written my first prescription for a Veridex-backed immunosuppressant. I compared the dates of those press releases against the quarterly financial reports William Hayes had submitted to his shareholders.

Every time Veridex reported a spike in research and development spending, they also reported a dip in clinical trial disclosures.

They were spending millions on something they were not putting on paper.

By Friday afternoon, my back was aching from sitting too long in the wooden chair, a dull, steady reminder that thirty-six percent was not cure territory. I took my afternoon medication, lay flat on the rug for twenty minutes with my knees bent to take the pressure off my spine, and stared at the ceiling.

My phone vibrated on the floor beside my hand.

Julian Carter — Attorney.

I answered on the third ring. "Good afternoon, Julian."

"Ms. Green," Julian said. His voice was dry, measured, and carried the calm assurance of a man who enjoyed reading financial footnotes for leisure. "I had a twenty-minute conversation with your husband's counsel this morning."

"Ex-husband in progress," I corrected gently.

"Of course. Mr. Green's attorney seems eager to expedite the signature process. He offered to cover the remainder of your medical deductible for the calendar year if you agree to the original property division terms by Tuesday."

I let out a short, dry laugh. "He wants to pay my deductible."

"He framed it as a humanitarian gesture," Julian said, and I could hear the faint rustle of pages turning on his end. "I informed him that a humanitarian gesture would have involved not freezing a joint checking account while his wife was sitting in an oncologist's waiting room. I also took the liberty of presenting him with the audit trail from his second startup."

"The seed capital," I said.

"Forty-two thousand dollars withdrawn from your personal savings across four distinct transfers in 2021," Julian said smoothly. "In addition to three documented email threads where Mr. Green introduced himself to his primary venture partner using your editorial credentials as a reference point. His attorney attempted to argue those were marital gifts."

"What did you say?"

"I asked him if he would like to explain to a family court judge why a woman with stage-four lupus is being offered a deductible stipend while her husband sits on an equity valuation built on her savings account." A brief pause. "He said he would get back to me after speaking with his client."

"Thank you, Julian."

"Do not sign anything Mr. Green sends to your email, Ms. Green. And if he calls you from a personal number, let it ring. He is beginning to realize the paperwork is not as clean as Dr. Cole likely assured him it would be."

"I don't answer his calls," I said.

"Good. Rest your hands. We have plenty of ammunition left."