Married To The Man Who Hates My Blood

Chapter One: The Price Of Friday The phone in my hand feels heavier than it should for something so small. "I'm sorry, Miss Okafor. Without payment secured by Friday, we'll have to release the surgical slot to another patient." I'm standing in the hospital corridor outside Silas's room, and the fluorescent light above me is buzzing so loud I can hear it under the nurse's voice. My throat has gone tight the way it does right before I cry—except I don't let myself cry here. Not where he might see through the little window in the door. "Please," I say. "I just need a little more time. I'm—I'm trying to sort the money." "I understand this is difficult." She doesn't sound like she understands at all. She sounds tired, like she's said this exact sentence to a hundred other people this month. Maybe she has. "But the tumour is in a position where every week of delay increases the risk significantly. I wish I had better news." I thank her, because that's what you do, even when someone has just told you your brother might die on a schedule dictated by a spreadsheet. I hang up, press my back against the cold wall, and breathe. Forty-two thousand pounds. That's the deposit that stands between Silas and a surgeon opening up his skull to take out the thing that's been causing his headaches, stealing his balance, and killing the strength in his left hand. Forty-two thousand pounds I do not have, will not have by Friday, and might never have if I live to be ninety doing this job. I've already asked everyone I can ask. My manager gave me an advance on my salary that covered precisely nothing. The bank looked at my file and my two jobs and said no—kindly, the way people say no when they've already decided long before you walked into the room. I sold my mother's wedding ring three weeks ago, and I still feel the phantom weight of it missing from the drawer where it used to sit. There is no one left. There has never really been anyone but me, not since I was nineteen and burying two parents within four months of each other. Mum first, then Dad—not from any disease, just a heart that stopped agreeing to keep beating without her in the house. Everyone said it was heartbreak. I used to think that was a poetic way of talking about grief. Now I know it's just medically true. Grief can kill you. I watched it happen. I push off the wall and go into Silas's room because I've been out here too long, and he'll ask why my face looks like that. He's fifteen and trying very hard to look like none of this frightens him, which is somehow worse than if he just let it out. He's got his laptop propped against his knees, some football match paused on the screen, and when I come in, he glances up. He does that thing where he studies my face for half a second before deciding what version of me he's going to pretend to believe. "You look like you just lost money on a bet," he says. "I don't bet. It's a stupid way to lose money you already don't have." "Very responsible of you." He goes back to his laptop. I sit on the edge of his bed and watch the side of his face—the way his hair's grown long over one ear because I haven't had time or money to take him for a cut—and I think, not for the first time, that I would set myself on fire before I let anything happen to him. "They're not going to cancel it," he says, without looking up. "The surgery." "Of course they're not." "You're a terrible liar, Favour." I laugh, and it comes out wrong—cracked right down the middle. He looks at me properly then, and for a second he's not fifteen at all. He's much older, old in the way you get when you've had to watch your only sister hold a whole world together with nothing but stubbornness. "I'll sort it," I tell him. "I always sort it." He doesn't answer that. He just reaches over, squeezes my hand once, hard, and goes back to his football match. I sit there a while longer, memorising the steady rhythmic hum of the monitors keeping track of him, because it's easier than thinking about Friday. I don't remember deciding to go back to the office that evening. My body just does it on autopilot, the way it does most things lately. Stopping to feel anything properly would mean I might not start again. Hale Industries occupies eleven floors of glass near the Thames, and at half past eight most of it is dark—except the top floor. The top floor is never dark, because Emmanuel Hale doesn't seem to require sleep the way the rest of us do. I tell myself I only came back for a file I left on my desk. I force myself to believe that's the only reason. His office door is open. He's standing at the floor-to-ceiling window with his jacket off and his tie loosened, looking down at the river like it owes him money. I've worked as this man's executive secretary for two years, and I still don't know how to read him. He is polite in the way expensive things are polite—smooth, controlled, giving nothing away for free. "Miss Okafor." He doesn't turn around. "It's late." "I forgot a file." My voice betrays me instantly—thin and unsteady—and I watch his broad shoulders shift, just slightly, at the sound of it. He turns around then. Whatever he sees on my face makes something move behind his dark eyes, something quick, sharp, and calculating that I'm too exhausted to name. "Sit down," he says. Not unkindly. But not kindly, either. "I'm fine, sir, I just need to—" "Sit down, Favour." It's the first time he's ever used my first name instead of my surname, and it startles me into obeying before I've even decided to move. I sit. He stays standing, watching me with an intensity that feels less like concern and more like he's solving an equation. "Your brother," he says calmly. "The surgery. Friday, isn't it?" I stare at him, my heart slamming against my ribs. "How do you—" "I make it my business to know things about the people who work for me." He says it simply, like it's not terrifying at all, like powerful men just routinely know the private terrors of their staff. "I can make the money problem disappear. Tonight, if you want it to." Something in my chest goes dead quiet. "Why would you do that?" He steps closer, the faint outline of a smile touching his lips, though it doesn't reach anywhere near his eyes. "There's a condition," he says, pushing a thick leather folder across the desk toward me.