Chapter 3

The ward was dark. Only neon from outside bled through the window, painting the room in cold, shifting colors.

Someone was sitting at the edge of my bed.

Not Leonard. I knew before I even opened my eyes — that glacial, suffocating presence, wound tight with suspicion. I'd spent too many years learning its shape.

"You're awake." Eleanor's voice came out of the dark, stripped of everything warm.

I tried to sit up. Pain detonated across my back and stomach, and I folded back against the pillow with a sharp gasp.

"Mom—" The word slipped out before I could stop it. "Ms. Vance."

"Drop the act, Hazel."

She rose and moved to the window, a silhouette against the neon.

"No one's here. Who's the victim routine for? Dr. Leonard?" A cold pause. "I'll give you credit — landing the youngest chief of surgery in this hospital takes a certain kind of talent."

Something clenched hard inside my chest.

"I didn't—"

Slap.

A folder hit my face.

"There's a check inside. One million dollars. And a one-way ticket to Europe."

She turned, looking down at me the way you look at something you've stepped in. "Take the money. Disappear. Stop circling Becky, and stop imagining you'll ever get anything else from me."

My hand found the envelope on the sheets. Trembling.

One million dollars.

Fifteen years. A ruptured spleen. A stomach eaten through. That was her number.

"Feeling sorry for yourself?" She closed the distance and grabbed my jaw, forcing my face up toward hers.

Her fingers were ice. Her nails pressed in.

"Every time I look at you — every time I see those eyes, Frank's eyes — I want to be sick." Her voice had started to shake. The breathing was wrong, too fast, the look behind her eyes going somewhere else.

"You are the worst thing that ever happened to me. You exist and I remember. I remember being chained in a basement in the Bronx like an animal. You carry his blood. A rapist's blood. Every single day."

The world came apart.

I had always known she hated me — the way you know a scar is there without looking.

But hearing it spoken, hearing it land between us like something solid, knocked the breath out of me.

Something tore loose inside me — claws dragging through whatever was left. Hot copper flooded the back of my throat.

I locked my jaw. Not here.

I swallowed it. Iron and something darker, coating my throat. My whole body shook with the effort of keeping still.

"I understand." I stared at the ceiling, at the dark shapes the neon made up there. My own voice sounded hollow, coming from far away. "I'll go."

Eleanor went still.

She hadn't expected that. I could feel her adjusting, searching for the next move — braced for tears, for begging, for the grasping desperation she'd probably seen in Frank. Not this.

"Smart girl." She let go, pulled a sanitizing wipe from her coat pocket, and cleaned her fingers like she was removing a contaminant.

"I'll have someone take you to the airport in the morning. If you try anything, I'll make sure that doctor who's been protecting you never works in medicine again."

She said it like she was closing a deal.

She didn't know I might not make it to morning.

"Ms. Vance."

She stopped at the door. Didn't turn around.

"Becky is a good girl." My vision had gone soft at the edges, tears doing what I'd refused to let them do until now. "Take care of her. Don't let her go through—" My throat closed. "Don't let her go through what you did."

Eleanor's shoulders locked up like she'd been struck from behind.

"Don't you dare say her name." She threw it over her shoulder like a stone, and then the door slammed and the room went silent.

I made it to the edge of the bed before my body gave out.

The blood came in waves — dark, almost black, soaking into the white sheets in spreading blooms.

I curled around the pain, fingers clawing at the mattress, nails splitting at the quick.

Mom. God, it hurts.

Frank's bat across my back when I was ten — I hadn't cried.

Moldy bread in the dark — I hadn't cried.

My terminal diagnosis alone in a fluorescent exam room — I hadn't cried.

But right now, folded over the side of a hospital bed with blood on my lips and no one coming, I wanted to cry more than I'd ever wanted anything.

I had spent my whole life trying to stitch something closed in her. Pressing my hands against a wound she'd never let me near.

And in the end she hadn't just turned me away — she'd used my hands to push me under.

I picked up the check. Tore it in half, then kept tearing until the pieces were too small to mean anything, and let them fall into the trash.

The last of what I'd hoped for went with them.