Ruthless Vow

Chapter One

Fourteen Days

"One hundred and twenty thousand dollars."

Dr. Patterson said the number like it was nothing. Like it was a parking ticket. I sat across from him and waited for him to say it again, because the first time it didn't land right.

"That's after insurance," he added.

I looked at the chart on his desk. Mia's name was at the top. Next to it was a date I didn't want to read properly.

"Two weeks," he said, answering before I asked. "If she doesn't get the surgery by the fourteenth, the risk becomes too high. I won't operate after that."

"The fourteenth."

"The fourteenth."

The clock above his desk said 4:52. I'd been in that hospital so many times in the last three years that I knew the third-floor coffee machine took exact change and I knew which nurse was kind and which one wasn't. I knew the elevator door had a dent in it from a stretcher that hit it the year Mom was there. I knew the smell of the fourth-floor hallway. I didn't know how to find a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in fourteen days.

But I nodded like I did. That's what I was good at. Nodding.

I did the math on my walk out of his office. Four hundred and twelve dollars in checking. Rent due on the first. Mia's medication is around three hundred a month. The electric bill is already late, second notice.

Then I thought about the car. It was the last thing I had that was worth anything, and it wasn't worth much — a twelve-year-old Corolla with two hundred and sixteen thousand miles and a check-engine light that had been on since March. The Blue Book said eighteen hundred on a good day. I owed twelve hundred in repairs I never paid for. That left six hundred, which covered four days of Mai’s medication and nothing else. I could have done it. I could have sold it and covered six hundred of a hundred and twenty thousand and felt like I at least did something. I put the keys back in my pocket. I needed them more than the money.

I bought pretzels from the vending machine outside the ICU because they were the cheapest thing in it. I ate them standing up while I checked my phone. Three missed calls from billing. One text from Sofia that just said, Are you good?"

I didn't answer any of them. I walked into Mai’s room like everything was fine.

She was sitting up with her sketchbook open on her knees. She was drawing something I couldn't see yet. She had markers spread out all over the blanket, the cheap ones I bought her at the pharmacy last month, and she didn't look up when I came in.

"Did you eat?" she asked.

"I ate."

"Pretzels don't count."

I sat on the edge of her bed and didn't answer. She finally looked up. She read my face the way she always did — fast, careful, no fuss. She was seventeen, and she'd been reading me since she was eight.

"It's bad, huh."

"It's the same." The lie came out easy. I'd been telling it so long it didn't even feel like lying anymore. "We're just keeping on."

She looked at me a beat too long. Then she went back to her sketchbook and let me keep the lie. That was the worst part about her. She always let me keep it.

I stayed an hour. We watched a game show with the sound off. She drew, I held a cup of green Jell-O I never ate. It was the calmest hour I'd had all week.

At seven, I kissed the top of her head and told her I'd be back in the morning. She said okay. She didn't look up. On my way out, I caught a look at the page she was working on. It was me. Standing in a doorway. I didn't know which doorway.

I sat in the parking lot with my phone in my hand for a long time.

Then I did what I always do, which was work, the problem. I called my old boss at the diner — he laughed before he realized I was serious. I called my cousin in Ohio — voicemail. I called a payday loan place and hung up when the woman got to the interest rate. I sat for twelve minutes with a medical financing company that said no politely at the end.

By nine, my phone was at eleven percent and I had exactly nothing.

Then Sofia called.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"Hospital parking lot."

"Don't move."

She was there in ten minutes, still in her scrubs, hair up with a pen stuck in it. She got in my passenger seat and pulled the door shut and looked at me for a second.

"How bad."

"Two weeks. A hundred and twenty thousand."

She didn't flinch. She was a nurse. She'd stopped flinching at numbers a long time ago. She just sat there and thought, and Sofia thought on lists, so I gave her a minute.

"There's a place downtown," she said finally. "A private club. My cousin did security there for a year before he got fired. He said the kind of money that moves through that building doesn't move through banks."

"What kind of money."

"The kind where people don't ask questions."

I stared at her. She stared back.

"I'm not saying go in there alone." She reached into her scrubs pocket and pulled out a receipt with an address written on the back. "I'm saying drive by it. Look at the building. If it feels wrong, walk away, and I'll help you find something else."

I took the receipt. It was near the financial district, on a street I'd walked past a hundred times without ever really seeing it.

"Okay," I said.

But she didn't get out of the car. She sat there a second longer, looking out the windshield at the hospital lights, and I knew her well enough to know there was something else.

"There's something else," she said.

"What."

"Someone's been calling the front desk. Asking about you. Asking about Mia." She turned to me. "Yolanda told me about it last week. I didn't think much of it. Then I heard it again this morning, so I asked her how many times this person has actually called."

"How many."

"Four. In the last nine days."

I put my hands flat on the steering wheel because they wouldn't sit still otherwise. "Who calls a hospital asking about me?"

"He won't leave a name. He's polite. He asks for you by full name." She paused. "Both of you. Marchetti."

"Okay. So someone's asking."

"That's not the part that bothers me." Sofia rubbed her face with one hand, tired, then dropped it into her lap. "The part that bothers me is what he asks about. He doesn't ask what room Mia's in. He doesn't ask about her condition."

"Then what does he ask about?"

"Your mother."

The parking lot lights buzzed. Sofia's pen fell out of her hair and landed on the seat between us. Neither of us picked it up.

"He asks about her appointments," she said. "From three years ago. Which doctors treated her. Which room she was in the night she died." She looked at me. "And then he asked how she died. Not when. When is on the chart. He keeps asking *how.* Yolanda says he asked her three separate times if it was sudden."

The vending machine near the entrance hummed. Somewhere down the block a car alarm went off and then stopped.

I didn't answer. I couldn't. There was a ringing in my ears that had nothing to do with the parking lot.

Sofia put her hand on my arm. "Elena."

"I'm fine."

"Elena."

"I said I'm fine."

She didn't push it. She just sat there with her hand on my arm for another second and then took it back and picked her pen up out of the seat.

"You still have the receipt," she said quietly. "You still have my address."

"I know."

"Drive by it. Don't go in."

"I said I know."

She got out of the car. She stood there for a minute with her arms crossed and made me promise to text her when I got home, and then she went back inside.

I sat there another minute. Then I started the engine and pulled onto the road and drove home the long way, so I could pass the address on the receipt just once. Just to see the building. I didn't get out of the car. I slowed down and looked at the black door and the man standing outside it who looked back at me like he already knew my face.

I kept driving. My hands didn't shake until I was on my own street.

I still didn't know who would pay a hundred and twenty thousand dollars to save my sister.

But somebody had been calling the hospital for nine days asking

How my mother died. Somebody who started asking before I ever heard of that black door downtown.

And I had fourteen days to find out who.