Chapter 2: The Price of Everything

Zaria’s POV

“Code blue, room 214.”

The announcement came over the speaker, followed by the sound of running feet. Two nurses rushed past me, one pushing a crash cart, another calling for the doctor.

I turned toward Odette’s room.

One of them got there before I did. She was already beside the bed, pressing two fingers to Odette’s wrist and checking the monitor. She looked at the screen again, then reached for the controls.

“She’s fine,” she said. “Probably a bad dream. Her numbers are already coming down.”

Odette’s eyes were closed. Her chest rose and fell slowly, and I counted three breaths before I let go of the door frame.

I stayed in the doorway with my bag still on my shoulder. Behind me, I could hear the two people in the corridor, but neither of them said a word.

“There’s a family room at the end of the hall,” the man said when I finally turned around. “Five minutes. That’s all we’re asking.”

“You’re not asking for anything. I don’t know you.”

“Then let us fix that,” the woman said. There was no anger in her voice. She said it so calmly that I found myself looking at her again.

I followed them because if I told them to leave, they would have to walk past Odette’s window again, and I didn’t want either of them looking at her for another second.

The family room had a couch with a torn arm and a table with a vase of plastic flowers. The man sat across from me, reached into his coat, and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He placed it on the table, then turned it around with one finger so I could read it.

It was my bill, the same forty-eight thousand from downstairs, but across the total someone had stamped PAID IN FULL in blue ink.

Under it was another sheet with a letterhead I didn’t know, Aldren Private Clinic. An admission form was clipped behind it, with Odette’s name already typed at the top.

“That was you,” I said. “You called about her account yesterday.”

“We wanted to know what we were dealing with,” the woman said.

She had introduced herself as Marguerite when we sat down.

“The balance is settled. She can be moved this afternoon. Aldren has a pulmonary wing, a private room, and a doctor who treats her illness every day.”

I slipped my hands under the table. “Where were you for twenty-two years?” I asked. “Because I’m not sure I believe you’re who you say you are.”

“We made mistakes.” She said it quickly, looking at the plastic flowers as she spoke.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one I’m giving you.”

I turned to the man. He looked straight at me. His mouth opened as if he wanted to say something, but he closed it again and folded his hands on the table.

“There’s one condition,” he said. “You come home with us. You live in our house, and you don’t ask us why.”

I let out a short laugh. “I don’t even know your last name.”

“Fenn,” he said. “It’s on your birth certificate, if you want to see it.”

“I want you to leave me and my grandmother alone.”

“Then we’ll go.”

Marguerite stood so smoothly that for a moment, I thought she really was leaving. She picked up the papers and tapped their edges against the table until they were perfectly even.

“The county ward can take her Friday,” she said. “I’m told the list is long, so she’ll be lucky to get a bed.”

My chair scraped back before I could tell my legs to move.

“Wait.” She stopped with her hand on the door but didn’t turn around. “I want to talk to my grandmother first.”

“Of course,” Gerald said. His voice was calm, almost too calm for everything that had just happened.

Odette was awake when I came in, her eyes fixed on the window in the door. Marguerite was still standing in the hallway, and Odette had gone pale against the sheet pulled up to her chin.

I sat on the edge of the bed, and she grabbed my wrist so hard that the tube under her nose shook.

“Who’s out there?”

“A man and a woman. They say they’re my parents.” I watched her mouth as I said it. She didn’t gasp or ask me to repeat myself. She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, they were wet.

“They said their name is Fenn.”

“Did they offer you something?”

“They’ll pay for everything. All of it, Grandma. They’ll move you to a good clinic today, but I have to go home with them, and I don’t…” My voice caught on the word home, and I stopped. “You know them.”

“Listen to me.” Her fingers shook around my wrist, but her voice didn’t. “If you go with them, then go. I won’t ask you to let me die here. But don’t take a single thing they hand you. Not a drink, a pill, or even a piece of gum. Nothing. Do you understand me, Zaria?”

“Why? What is this? What did they do?”

“I should have told you a long time ago.” She started coughing, and I held her shoulders until it passed. When she could breathe again, she pressed her lips to my knuckles. They were dry and cold. “Not now. I can’t say it now. Just promise me.”

“I promise.”

I signed the transfer forms at the family room table, and my handwriting looked like a child’s. Marguerite folded her copy and put it in her bag. Gerald made one phone call, and within twenty minutes, two paramedics wearing jackets with a different logo wheeled Odette past me.

She lifted one hand from the blanket and touched my sleeve as they went by.

I walked alongside the stretcher to the doors and stood there until the ambulance turned the corner.

In the parking lot, the wind pulled my hair across my face. Marguerite stood beside a long black car with her gloved hands folded in front of her, while Gerald held the back door open.

I didn’t get in. I stood there with my bag against my chest, looking at the two people who were supposed to be my parents. Neither of them held my gaze for long.

“By the way, Zaria,” Marguerite said, and took out her phone. “You have a sister.”

She turned the screen toward me. The girl in the photo stood at the top of a staircase in a long silver dress, her hair pinned up and her chin lifted. She had my eyes, my mouth, and the small dent above my left eyebrow.

It was my face in a dress I could never afford.