Chapter 4 - The Price of Asking
Celia wasn't outside the hospital when Gabriel went looking for her. Her driver said she had taken a taxi back to the penthouse, saying the child needed familiar pajamas. Gabriel nearly ordered her brought back immediately.
His thumb hovered over Jonah's number. He could picture a black SUV stopping outside Celia's apartment, men pressing a frightened woman into a car, an answer extracted before dinner. For most of his adult life that had been his first and most reliable solution to obstruction.
But the picture would not stay clean. Celia knew where Lily slept. If she was involved, sending armed men would give her warning and perhaps destroy evidence. If she was innocent, it would teach Lily that her father answered every difficulty by terrifying someone else.
He called Jonah instead.
“I want her location,” he said.
“From the police, or from us?” Jonah asked.
Gabriel didn't answer.
“Boss, I was outside the operating room after Mara died. I watched you tell Lily she didn't have to be afraid. I was standing right there when you said it.”
“What's your point?”
“You can't say that and have me drag a woman into a car because you need somebody to blame.”
There was a click of traffic in the background. Gabriel looked at the row of vending machines and could suddenly remember Mara teasing him because he'd once paid a driver fifty dollars to retrieve a forgotten pair of toddler rain boots.
“Let the detectives find her,” he said finally.
Jonah released a breath. “I'll call Ortiz.”
“Don't,” Claire said.
They stood by the vending machines, the only place on the floor where the private security detail couldn't hear every word.
“She knew about a transfer she shouldn't have known about,” Gabriel said. “Somebody told her, or she had another way of finding out.”
“Then tell the detective. Don't threaten a woman because you're scared.”
“You have no idea what I'm scared of.”
“I know you're standing in a hospital hallway arguing instead of getting a sandwich. I know Lily keeps asking where you are and won't ask when you're in the room.”
He stared at her. “Why won't she ask?”
“Maybe she thinks wanting things makes them disappear.”
Gabriel pressed the heel of one hand against his eyes. For a man who had spent his life collecting leverage, his daughter's needs left him with none.
Detective Lena Ortiz arrived that afternoon in a dark coat carrying a notebook, not a badge she waved for effect. She was in her late forties with graying hair and the habit of listening past the end of people's sentences. She brought a child-abuse specialist trained to interview young witnesses, but neither intended to question Lily while Patel advised against it.
“I've been requesting the original vehicle schedule for five days,” Ortiz told Gabriel in the consultation room. “Today your attorney finally says I can have it. What changed?”
“My daughter drew a door.”
Ortiz held his gaze. “A child drawing a door isn't grounds to accuse someone.”
“I didn't accuse anybody.”
“You had your security team call a woman at work twenty-one times last night. That's not restraint.”
Gabriel said nothing.
Ortiz turned to Claire. “What did you hear, exactly?”
Claire repeated Lily's words and explained where she was sitting, what she had been doing, and that Celia was not present for the drawing. When Ortiz asked whether Claire believed Celia was involved, she said she did not know. It felt inadequate. It was also true.
Afterward Claire stepped into a stairwell and called her mother. Margaret didn't answer. Claire called again, then her neighbor, Mrs. Alvarez, who told her an ambulance had taken Margaret to Mount Sinai Queens an hour earlier after a fever during treatment.
Claire was on the train before Gabriel found out she had left.
At the emergency department she sat beside Margaret's bed, looking at the pale bruise around the needle in her mother's arm. The on-call doctor explained that an infection was being evaluated and that the chemotherapy team would coordinate next steps. It might mean treatment was delayed. Claire hated that the physician couldn't make a date sound certain.
Margaret watched her face. “Don't get that look.”
At the foot of the bed lay a pair of slippers Claire had bought when Margaret began treatment. One sole had started peeling away. Claire bent and pressed it flat, although she knew it wouldn't stay.
A volunteer came in with a paper menu. Margaret chose soup, then asked for crackers. Claire wanted to demand crackers immediately. There was a hospital full of more complicated things she couldn't control, and this small argument offered the illusion of progress.
“Please sit,” Margaret said.
Claire sat. Her mother pointed toward a coffee mark on Claire's cuff.
“Did you eat?”
“Not really.”
“Your daughter is sick, you don't eat,” Margaret muttered, then corrected herself. “Sorry. I'm the sick one. You're the daughter. I'm losing track.”
“You're not.”
“I am sometimes.” Margaret took her hand. “You look as though you think sitting here isn't enough.”
Claire stared at their hands. “I can't be everywhere at once.”
“I didn't ask you to be. You did.”
Outside the curtain somebody laughed at a television show. Claire studied the wet stain until she stopped seeing anything in it. The doctor's uncertainty about the infection did not become less frightening. But she had a chair, and Margaret was awake, and the two of them were still able to argue about crackers.
“Fine,” Claire whispered. “I'll eat.”
“Good. The soup here is terrible. Find something better.”
“What look?”
“The one that says you can fix a hospital by being mad enough.”
Claire laughed once, the kind of laugh that hurt.
“I left the little girl,” she admitted.
“You came to me.”
“That's still leaving.”
“Claire. Your job isn't to make everybody stay alive with your bare hands.”
At midnight Gabriel called. Claire stepped into the corridor, expecting to be fired. Instead his first question was whether Margaret was stable.
“She has an infection,” Claire said. “They're treating it.”
“Do you need a ride?”
“No.”
“I can send someone.”
“Please don't. I'm tired of people deciding what I need.”
A pause. “Fine. Lily drank a little broth. Sandra wrote it down like it was a winning lottery ticket.”
Claire sat against the wall. “That's good.”
“She wants to know if Noodle is coming back.”
“He's staying with her. Tell her he's on duty.”
After they hung up, she found an envelope notification from Pembrook. The promised advance had been deposited. It was real money, not cash in a briefcase, and her bank app showed a balance that made her hands shake.
She began filling in the hospital's payment portal and stopped at the final button. Margaret had spent decades telling her not to borrow trouble. Taking this money was earning it, Claire reminded herself, and yet she was already thinking of how hard it might be to say no to Gabriel tomorrow.
May you like
She put the phone away without making the payment. At the nurses' station, Mrs. Alvarez was waiting with Margaret's slippers in a plastic shopping bag.
“There's something else,” the neighbor said. “A woman called your mother's room after you left. Asked whether you were working for the Varricks.”
