Chapter 5: The Name on Her Emergency Contact

ADRIAN

“Four million dollars a year, Adrian, is a very expensive way to feel sentimental.”

Raymond Sterne said it pleasantly, the way he says everything, while his daughter’s slides glowed on the boardroom wall. He had a tan that did not belong in Michigan in February, and he was looking past me through the window at his own house on the lake.

“The Juniper Ward is not a sentiment,” I said. “It is twenty-four beds.”

“It is twenty-four beds that lose money every night they’re full.” He turned to the committee. “Paige, would you take them through it?”

Paige Sterne stood beside the screen in a white suit, holding a laser pointer she did not need. She is thirty-three and the smartest person on her father’s side of any table. I was engaged to her for fourteen months once, and neither of us has mentioned it in five years.

“Pediatric inpatient services lost four point one million dollars last year,” she said. “MeridianCare can absorb our patients in Grand Rapids at a third of the cost per bed.”

“What does it cost when a child is sent two hours from home and comes back sicker?” I asked.

She clicked to the next slide and then back again. “We haven’t modeled readmissions.”

“Then model them before you close anything.”

Her jaw tightened slightly, and her father smiled at me as if I had told a joke he had heard before.

“Then let’s make it formal,” Raymond said. “I move that the full board vote at the March meeting on closing the Juniper Ward and on MeridianCare’s offer for Cole Health.”

The motion went into the minutes. Nobody seconded it out loud, because nobody had to.

I did the arithmetic in the margin of my agenda anyway. The Foundation’s trustees had voted with Raymond on everything since my father’s funeral, so the whole hospital came down to the last thirty percent, and it belonged to a man whose name I did not know.

“My people found the heir, by the way,” Raymond said as he gathered his papers. “We had a very pleasant conversation.”

Of course you did. You have never had an unpleasant conversation with a man you intend to buy.

Paige caught me at the elevator.

“I hear you answered a kindergartner in four minutes,” she said.

“She’s five and three quarters.”

“You used to make me wait three days for a text.” She pressed the button for the lobby. “Penn is the name, I hear. Should I know that name?”

“You shouldn’t, no.”

She watched the numbers above the door until it opened. Then she stepped in and turned to face me, and for half a second her face was not her father’s at all.

“Good, then I won’t,” she said, and the doors closed.

She knows the name. I would like to know how.

Walter Bray called at four. He told me the heir would attend the March board meeting in person and had asked that his name be kept private until then.

All I have ever known about my father’s other son is that his mother was a nurse named Nora. I found her letters when I was sixteen, in a shoebox in my father’s closet, and my father burned them in the fireplace while I watched. He told me never to go looking for the boy, and I never did.

“I can find him by Friday,” Hollis said when I had hung up.

“My father’s son asked for privacy, Hollis. He can have it.”

“Your father’s son also asked for thirty percent of the company, sir.”

“Then he can have that too, until he votes.”

At six I walked over to the lakefront wing. I told myself it was to look at the beds Raymond wanted to close, and it is possible that I believed it.

Bev Tran was at the nurses’ station writing on a whiteboard. She looked at me over her glasses.

“If you came to close my ward, Your Majesty, take the stairs on your way out, and take your time.”

“I came to see it, Bev.”

“That’s what the last one said, and he wanted to put in a coffee bar.”

Through the glass of Bed Twelve I could see Isla sitting on the edge of a boy’s bed, doing a card trick. The boy was bald and laughing, and a fat orange goldfish was watching from the windowsill. She fanned the cards out one-handed, the way she used to on night shifts when the children couldn’t sleep and neither could she.

She looked up and saw me through the glass.

She turned her back on the window, very deliberately, and kept shuffling. The boy waved at me over her shoulder.

She used to save me the last card. She would hold it up at two in the morning and make me guess.

She came out ten minutes later with the deck in her pocket and walked straight past me to the medication room. I followed her, because the Juniper Rescue Plan was mine and so, technically, was the medication room.

“You’re on my ward,” she said without turning around.

“It’s the children’s ward, Ms. Penn, and I pay for its lights.”

“Then you can pay for them from the ninth floor.” She scanned a vial and checked it twice. “The first rescue meeting is at seven tomorrow. I’ll be there because Milo asked me to be.”

“Bring readmission figures. Paige doesn’t have them.”

“I’ve been keeping them since my second day.” She finally looked at me, and she was twisting her ring. “I have one condition, Mr. Cole. Don’t come down here when my daughter is on this ward.”

“Is that a request from my nurse lead?”

“It’s a request from her mother.”

She walked out with the vial before I could answer.

Hollis was waiting in my office at nine with a folder.

“This is the appointment paperwork for your new nurse lead, sir,” he said. “Human resources needs your signature on page three.”

I signed page three. Then, because I have never in my life signed a document without reading it, I turned back to page one.

It was her staff file, the standard sheet. Under her name was her Michigan license number, granted in January on the strength of an Oregon license. Under that was her address on Linden Street, and under that was the box for her emergency contact.

She had filled it in with her own small, slanted hand, and she had written Owen Shaw, fiancé.

That morning he had been a first name and a sapphire ring. Now h

e had a surname, and I had never heard it in my life.