Ruthless Vow

Fourteen Days

Elena Pov

Dr. Patterson gave me two weeks.

He said it the way he'd said everything else for the last three years — calm, level, like he was reading it off a form. "If she doesn't have the surgery by the fourteenth, the risk becomes too high. I won't operate after that."

"And the cost?" "One hundred and twenty thousand. After insurance."

I sat across from him and did the math before he finished the sentence, because I always do the math. Four hundred and twelve dollars in checking. Rent due on the first. Mia's medications are about three hundred a month.

The electric bill was already on its second notice. The clock above his desk read 4:52. I'd been in this hospital so many times over the last three years that I knew the third-floor coffee machine took exact change.

I knew the elevator door had a dent in it from a stretcher. I knew four different nurses by name and which one would slip Mia an extra pudding cup. 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'm good at. Nodding. I did the rest of the math on the walk to Mia's room.

The car was the only thing I owned that was worth anything, and it wasn't worth much. Twelve years old, two hundred and sixteen thousand miles, check-engine light on since March. If I found the right buyer, I could get eighteen hundred dollars for it. Twelve hundred of that would go straight to the shop for repairs I never paid for.

That left six hundred dollars, which was two months of Mia's medication. Two months of medication. Out of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. I could have done it anyway. Sold it, cleared the debt, handed over six hundred dollars and told myself I'd tried.

I put the keys back in my pocket. I needed more than six hundred dollars. Mia was sitting up when I came in, sketchbook open on her knees, markers spread across the blanket. Cheap ones from the pharmacy.

The good sets cost forty dollars and I'd been telling myself for two years that I'd buy her one. "Did you eat?" she asked, without looking up. "I ate." "Pretzels don't count." I sat on the edge of her bed and didn't answer.

She looked up then. She read my face the way she always did — quick, 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 went back to her drawing and let me keep the lie. That's the worst part about her. She always lets me keep it.

I stayed an hour. We watched a game show with the sound off. She drew and I held a cup of green Jell-O I never ate, and 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.

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 for a long time with my phone in my hand. Then I did what I always do, which is 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 through 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 through 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's a nurse. She stopped flinching at numbers a long time ago.

She just sat there and thought, and Sofia thinks in lists, so I gave her a minute. "You've tried everyone?" "Everyone I can think of." "Then try someone you can't." She reached into her scrubs pocket and pulled out a receipt. On the back, in blue pen, an address downtown. "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 took the receipt. It was near the financial district — a street I'd walked past a hundred times without ever really seeing it. "I'm not saying go in there," she said. "I'm saying drive by it. Look at the building. If it feels wrong, walk away and I'll help you find something else." "Okay." She got out, then stopped with her hand on the door and looked back at me through the window. "There's something else," she said. "What?"

"Someone's been calling the ward. Asking about you. Asking about Mia." She said it carefully, the way nurses say things they've already decided you won't like.

"Yolanda told me last week and I didn't think much of it. Then she mentioned 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 both hands 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 your full name." She paused. "Both of you. Marchetti." "Okay. So someone's asking." "That's not the part that bothers me."

Sofia pulled the door shut again and turned to face me properly. "He doesn't ask what room Mia's in. He doesn't ask about her condition. He never asks about the surgery." "Then what does he ask about?" "Your mother."

The parking lot lights buzzed overhead. Somewhere behind us a cart rattled across the pavement and stopped. "He asks about her appointments," Sofia 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 asks 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." I didn't answer. I couldn't. There's a ringing that starts in my ears when something is very wrong, and it has started.

I don't have a mother anymore. I have a story about a mother — the version people tell at funerals, the version with the heart condition and the tired smile.

Three years ago I sat in a hallway on the fourth floor while a doctor came out and told me they'd done everything they could. Nobody has ever asked me how she died. Not once. Not one person in three years. Somebody had been asking every day for nine days. "Elena." "I'm fine." "Elena." "I said I'm fine." Sofia didn't push it.

She sat with me another minute, then got out of the car and made me promise to text her when I got home, and went back inside. I stayed in the parking lot another twenty minutes doing nothing at all. Then I drove home the long way, past the address on the receipt, just once, just to see the building. I didn't get out of the car.

I slowed down at the corner and looked at the black door with no sign on it, and the man standing outside it in a dark coat. He was looking back at me. Not scanning the street. Not watching the traffic. Looking at my car, at my face through the windshield, the way you look at somebody you were told to expect.

I kept driving. My hands didn't start shaking until I was on my own street. Somebody had been calling my sister's hospital for nine days asking how my mother died. And somebody downtown already knew my car.

The Address

Elena Pov

I didn't sleep.

Every time I closed my eyes I saw the man outside that black door, looking at my car like he'd been told to watch for it. Nine days. Four calls. A number in a chart that existed before I ever heard it out loud.

At six I got up and started making phone calls. I arrived at the bank.

The bank said no before I finished my sentence.

His name was Mr. Bailey. He had my application in front of him and my bank statements beside it, and he flipped to the second page, read it the way you read a menu you already know you can't afford, and closed the folder.

"You don't have enough credit history for a loan this time"

"I can sign a repayment plan. Ten years."

"That's not how this works."

I picked up my folder and left before he could give me the patient smile he was building up to.

It went like that all morning. A credit union on Ninth. Two online lenders who took my information a