The Case Against Valencia

3:14

The streetlights blurred into long, sickly yellow smears against the window. I sat in the passenger seat with my pajamas tucked into my jeans, staring at the digital clock on the dash: 3:14 AM. The numbers flickered, mocking the way my heart was hammering against my ribs. Beside me, Aunt Sarah drove like she was trying to outrun the wind, her knuckles white as bone against the steering wheel.

"Aunt Sarah?" I asked, my voice cracking. "Just tell me what happened."

She didn't answer. She just checked the rearview mirror again, her breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches. When she finally swung the car into the hospital bay, the tires shrieked against the pavement, a sound that made my skin crawl.

The ER sliding doors hissed open, and the heat hit me first, that thick, sterile air that smells like bleach and old coffee. Aunt Sarah’s hand was a vice around my wrist, dragging me toward the intake desk. My brain was stuck on a loop, noticing things that didn't matter: the way the linoleum floor tiles were chipped, the humming of the fluorescent lights, and the fact that I’d put my sneakers on without socks. My ankles were freezing, but my face felt like it was on fire.

"Name?" the woman behind the desk asked. Her voice was flat, bored, just another Tuesday for her.

"Montgomery," Aunt Sarah choked out. "The... the highway accident. We're family."

The woman’s expression shifted instantly. The boredom vanished, replaced by a pity that made my stomach churn. She looked past Aunt Sarah, her eyes landing on me for a split second before she looked away.

Across the room, I saw a police officer standing by a set of double doors. He was holding a clear plastic baggie with my dad’s brown leather wallet inside. The leather was scuffed and dark with something wet.

The officer looked at me, and I saw his hand tighten around the baggie. The plastic crinkled, a sharp, cheap sound that felt loud enough to shatter glass.

"Is there somewhere quiet we can go?" The officer’s voice was low, directed at Aunt Sarah, but his eyes stayed on me. He looked at my bare ankles, then back up, his expression softening into something like a flinch.

Aunt Sarah didn't move. She just stood there, her fingers still digging into my wrist like she was trying to anchor herself to my bone. "Just tell us," she whispered. "Is he... are they..."

A doctor appeared behind the officer. He looked tired. Not the kind of tired you get from a long day, but the kind that looked like it was written into the lines around his mouth. He didn't say a word. He just slowly shook his head, once, and the movement was so small it felt like a secret.

The hospital didn't go quiet. That was the worst part. A vending machine hummed down the hall; someone’s pager went off with a rhythmic, chirping beep; a janitor pushed a yellow bucket across the tiles. My parents were gone, and the building was still breathing.

I felt a sudden, violent surge of cold, the kind that starts in your marrow and turns your blood to slush. My ears started ringing, a high-pitched whine that drowned out Sarah’s first sob. I stared at the wallet in the baggie. I wanted to reach out and take it. I wanted to tell the officer that the "wet stuff" on the leather didn't belong there, that my dad was careful with his things, that he’d be annoyed if he knew it was ruined.

"They didn't feel any pain," the doctor said, his voice coming from a thousand miles away.

It was a lie. I could feel enough pain for all three of us. My lungs felt like they’d been filled with lead, heavy and useless. I tried to take a breath, but the sterile air tasted like iron and dust. I looked down at my hands, surprised to see they weren't shaking. They were perfectly still, resting against my knees, while the rest of the world dissolved into a smear of yellow light and white noise.

The last thing I remember was the world fading around me.

I woke up in my bed. For a split second, everything was perfect. The sunlight was streaming in, looking all gold and innocent, and I could hear the house moving. The chatter of my sisters was loud downstairs, that annoying, high-pitched bickering over who got the last of the orange juice and I could hear the movements of someone making breakfast.

The clink of a pan, the smell of butter hitting the heat.

It felt like a normal morning. I almost reached for my phone to complain about the weird, dark dream I’d had.

But then I felt it. The heavy, stiff denim of my jeans still tucked into my pajama bottoms.

The memory hit me like a brick to the chest.

Suddenly, the noise downstairs sounded like a lie. My sisters were laughing, but it was too sharp, like they were trying to scream through their teeth. Whoever was in the kitchen was moving too fast, the plates rattling too loud, like they were trying to keep the silence from catching up to them.

I laid there, paralyzed. My skin still smelled like that "bleach and old coffee" hospital air. I didn't want to move. I knew the second I sat up, the "before" part of my life was officially over.

I kicked the covers off, my legs feeling like lead as I swung them over the side of the bed. I didn't even stop to take off the jeans or the socks I'd slept in. I just needed to get to the stairs.

Every step down felt like I was moving through waist-high water. I was half-hoping, no, I was praying, that I’d get to the bottom and see Mom at the stove, complaining about the toaster, while Dad sat at the table trying to tickle my sisters until they turned blue. I wanted the hospital to be a hallucination. I wanted the smell of bleach to be a bad memory of a dream.

I reached the doorway to the kitchen and stopped.

The chatter was there, but it wasn't right. My sisters were sitting at the table, their cereal bowls untouched, talking in these fast, nervous bursts like they were afraid to stop. And there, standing at the stove with her back to me, was Aunt Sarah.

She was wearing one of Mom’s aprons, the one with the faded lemons on it, but it hung off her shoulders all wrong. She was moving a spatula around an empty pan, the metal scraping against metal over and over. She wasn't actually cooking anything. She was just... moving.

Then she turned around.

Her eyes were red-rimmed and hollow, and when she saw me, her hand flew to her mouth to stifle a sob. The "normal" morning I’d imagined shattered right there on the linoleum. Dad’s chair at the head of the table was empty. His coffee mug was sitting in the sink, unwashed from the night before, a tiny, brutal reminder that he wasn't coming back to finish it.

"Hey, honey," Aunt Sarah whispered, her voice sounding like it had been dragged through gravel.

My sisters went dead silent. They looked at me, then at the empty pan, then back at me. They didn't know yet. Not the whole thing. They just knew the house felt like it was holding its breath.

I forced a swallow, trying to get rid of the literal lump of lead in my throat. I couldn't do it. I couldn't be the one to watch their faces fall apart. Not yet.

"Morning," I croaked. My voice sounded like it belonged to a stranger, but my sisters didn't seem to notice. They were too busy stabbing at their Cheerios.

Aunt Sarah still stood frozen at the stove. She looked so young, only twenty-three, basically a kid herself, and Mom’s lemon apron was wrapped twice around her waist just to stay on. She looked like she was drowning in it. Her eyes locked onto mine, wide and pleading, like she was begging me not to say the words out loud. If we didn't say it, it wasn't real. That was the deal.

"Hey," she said, her voice shaking as she pushed the empty pan aside. "I, uh... I was just making some eggs. Or trying to."

"Smells good," I lied. The only thing I could smell was that sterile hospital smell clinging to my own skin, but I pulled out a chair anyway.

I sat in my usual spot, right across from the empty chair at the head of the table. I kept my eyes glued to the grain of the wood, focusing on a tiny scratch near the edge so I wouldn't have to see the empty space where Dad usually sat with his newspaper.

"You're wearing jeans," my youngest sister, Maya, pointed out, her spoon mid-air. "Did you sleep in your clothes? Mom’s gonna kill you."

The word kill hit the room like a grenade. Sarah flinched so hard she nearly dropped the spatula, and I had to grip the underside of the table until my splinters dug into my fingers.

"Just felt like a jeans day, Lily," I said, forcing a shrug that felt like it cost me a thousand pounds of energy. "Where's the juice?"

I reached for the carton, my hand steady even though my insides were screaming. I poured a glass, watching the orange liquid swirl, doing everything in my power to act like this was just another Wednesday, while Aunt Sarah watched me from the stove, her face pale and her knuckles white, both of us just waiting for the lie to cave in.

The day of the funeral, the air felt thick, like we were all trying to breathe underwater. My sisters had found out a few days before, and watching them try to "grasp" the idea of death was like watching someone try to catch smoke with their bare hands. They didn't cry all the time; instead, they’d ask these weird, impossible questions, like if Dad would be cold or if Mom still needed her glasses.

I stood in front of the mirror, fumbling with a tie I didn't know how to knot. Aunt Sarah came in, looking like a ghost in a black dress that made her look even younger than twenty-three. Her eyes were puffy, and she looked like she hadn't slept since that night at the hospital.

"Here," she whispered, her fingers trembling as she took the silk from my hands. "Let me."

She worked in silence, her knuckles brushing my chin. Outside the room, I could hear Maya in the hallway, her voice small and confused.

"But why can't they just come home for dinner?" she asked. "I’ll give Mom my dessert. I promise."

Sarah’s hands faltered, and for a second, I thought she was going to lose it right there. But she took a breath, tightened the knot, and smoothed down my collar.

"We have to go," she said, though she sounded like she was talking to herself.

We walked downstairs, and the house felt cavernous. Every corner was a reminder of something missing, the pile of mail Dad hadn't opened, the half-finished book on Mom’s nightstand.

My sisters were waiting by the door, dressed in matching dark dresses that looked itchy and uncomfortable. They looked at me like I had the answers, like I was the one who could explain why we were getting into a car to go say goodbye to a pair of boxes.

I

grabbed the keys, but they felt like they weighed fifty pounds. I’d only had my JOL for four months, and under Massachusetts law, I wasn't even supposed to have friends in the car. But siblings were okay. Immediate family. The only ones left.

The walk to the driveway felt like a death march. Aunt Sarah looked at me, then at the driver's side door, her face a mask of worry. She knew I hadn’t driven since that night. She knew my hands were probably shaking as hard as hers were.

"You sure you got this?" she whispered, her voice barely audible over the sound of a distant siren somewhere down the block.

"Yeah," I lied, my voice cracking. "I got it."

The interior of the car smelled like Mom’s vanilla air freshener and the old gym bag Dad always forgot in the backseat. It was a time capsule of a life that didn't exist anymore. I slid into the driver's seat, adjusted the mirror, and saw my sisters in the back, two small, black-clad ghosts staring back at me.

I gripped the steering wheel at ten and two. My knuckles were so white they looked like they were made of chalk. Every time a car sped past on the street, I flinched, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I could almost hear the sound of the metal crunching again, even though the street was perfectly quiet.

"Seatbelts," I said, my voice sounding more like Dad's than I wanted to admit.

The click-click from the backseat was the only sound in the car. I shifted into gear, the engine's hum feeling like a physical vibration in my teeth. I wasn't just driving to a cemetery; I was carrying everything I had left in the world in a ton of metal and glass, and the terror of something else going wrong was so thick I could taste it.

I pulled out of the driveway, the Boston skyline visible in the distance, sharp, cold, and completely indifferent to the fact that we were falling apart.

The funeral was a total blur. A smudge of black suits, the smell of rainy dirt, and a bunch of people I barely knew telling me how "strong" I was being. I didn't feel strong. I felt like a hollow shell held together by starch and a tie that was choking me.

The drive back through Boston was even worse. The city kept moving, the T-trains screeched, and people walked their dogs like the world hadn't just ended. We got inside the house, and the silence hit like a physical weight. I didn't say a word to my sisters or Sarah. I just walked straight upstairs, kicked off my shoes, and crawled into bed with my clothes still on. I pulled the duvet over my head, wanting to disappear into the dark until the clock reset itself.

Downstairs, Sarah was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at a stack of paperwork she didn't know how to handle. At twenty-three, her life was supposed to be about late shifts and figuring out her own mess, not suddenly being a mother of three in a house full of ghosts.

Her phone buzzed on the wood. It was Elena, one of the nurses she’d worked with during her clinicals.

"Sarah? Are you alone?" Elena’s voice was low, shaky.

"The kids are... they're around," Sarah whispered, rubbing her temples. "What's wrong?"

"I shouldn't be telling you this. I could lose my job, but Sarah... I saw the logs from that night." Elena took a sharp breath. "Your brother and his wife? They were stable when they got to the bay. They were priority one. But the Chief of Surgery... he got a call from the head of the hospital."

Sarah’s hand tightened around the phone. "What are you talking about?"

"The Mayor’s son came in ten minutes later with a leg fracture and some internal bruising. He could have waited. He should have waited," Elena hissed. "But the Chief ordered the only trauma surgeon on call to drop everything for the Mayor’s kid. Your family... they were left waiting for a backup surgeon who was twenty minutes out. They could have been saved, Sarah. They had a chance, and the hospital chose the Mayor instead."

Sarah couldn't scream. She couldn't even cry. She just sat there in the quiet kitchen, staring at the empty pan on the stove, the grief in her chest suddenly turning into something much colder and much sharper.

I didn't actually sleep. I was just staring at the wall, listening to the house breathe, when I heard Sarah’s voice drop into that sharp, panicked whisper. I crept to the top of the stairs, the carpet dampening my footsteps, and listened to the floorboards groan as Elena’s voice leaked through the phone.

The words "Mayor’s son" and "could have been saved" hit me like a physical punch. My stomach did a slow, nauseating roll. They weren't just gone because of an accident; they were gone because someone decided their lives were worth less than a politician’s kid’s broken leg.

I didn't storm down. I didn't scream. I just walked down the stairs, my face feeling like stone, and stepped into the kitchen.

Sarah jumped, nearly dropping her phone as she scrambled to hang up. Her face was ghost-white. "Aster? I thought you were—"

"We should sue them," I said. My voice was eerily calm, even to my own ears.

Sarah blinked, her eyes darting toward the hallway where my sisters were. "Honey, you weren't supposed to hear that. Elena was just… she’s upset, she doesn't know—"

"She knows they died because a surgeon walked away," I cut her off, pulling out a chair and sitting across from her. I looked her dead in the eye. "If we take them to court, if we get a lawyer, we can make them pay for what they did. We can get justice for them."

Sarah’s expression shifted from shock to a deep, exhausted kind of pity. She leaned forward, her hands shaking as she gripped her coffee mug. "Aster, look at me. I'm twenty-three. I have a nursing degree I haven't even used yet and three kids who need to eat. That money your parents left? The life insurance, the savings? That’s for your college. That’s for Maya’s braces and the mortgage on this house."

"But they killed them," I whispered, the calm finally starting to crack.

"And a lawsuit against a major Boston hospital? Against the city's top surgeon?" Sarah shook her head, a tear finally escaping. "They’d bury us in legal fees before we even got a court date. We’d spend every cent your parents worked for just to lose to a team of twenty lawyers. I can’t gamble your future on a 'maybe,' Aster. I have to keep you guys safe. That's the only job I have now."

I looked at her, then at the empty chair at the head of the table. The justice I wanted felt a million miles away, locked behind a vault I couldn't afford to open.

I didn’t argue with her. I just looked at the wood grain of the table and nodded, but my heart felt like it had turned into a block of dry ice, cold and smoking.

Sarah thought she was protecting us by holding onto the money, but she didn’t get it. You don't play defense against people like that. The name Elena had whispered over the phone burned into my brain: Marcus II Sterling. The man who owned half of Boston and apparently thought he owned my parents' lives, too. He wasn't just some guy; he was the owner of Sterling University Hospital, the kind of man who could move mountains with a single phone call while my dad died in a hallway.

“You’re right,” I said, my voice as flat as the linoleum floor. “We need that money for the girls.”

Sarah reached out to touch my hand, looking relieved that I was "being reasonable." She didn't see the fire starting behind my eyes. She didn't see that I wasn't giving up; I was just changing the game.

I went back upstairs, but I didn't go to bed. I sat at my desk and pulled out a fresh notebook. On the very first page, I wrote one name in jagged, black ink: MARCUS STERLING II.

I wasn't going to waste my parents' savings on a lawyer who would just get bullied by Sterling’s legal team. I was going to be the lawyer. I’d spend every waking second of the next few years becoming the person who could tear that hospital apart from the inside. I’d learn every loophole, every law, and every dirty secret the Sterlings used to stay on top.

I looked out the window toward the city skyline, where the Sterling University Hospital logo glowed like a middle finger against the night sky.

"I'm coming for you," I whispered to the empty room.

I had a new job now. It wasn't just being a brother or a son. It was being the shadow that would eventually bury Marcus Sterling. And I was willing to wait as long as it took.