Chapter 2
My brother, Jonah, at nineteen.
Smoke-blackened windows.
My mother screaming his name on a suburban street in Ohio.
Three hospitals telling us they were not equipped.
Seven hours before anyone touched him who truly knew burns.
Seven hours was too long.
Jonah died before sunrise.
I was nineteen when I learned that the body remembers fire even after the flames are gone. I was twenty-eight when my first company sold. I was thirty-three when I signed the papers funding a burn treatment center in New York because I could not go back and save Jonah, but I could build a place where someone else’s brother might live.
Margaret knew my net worth down to a conservative estimate.
She did not know why one entire wing of a hospital carried my foundation’s name.
That ignorance would ruin her.
At the hospital, bright lights swallowed me.
Voices moved above me. Severe burns across upper back. Deep partial thickness. Possible full thickness on both arms. Pain management. Fluids. Debridement. Surgical consult.
Then a woman’s face appeared over mine.
Dr. Maren Ellis had short blonde hair, blue eyes sharp with intelligence, and the kind of calm that made a room obey her. She had once turned down my recruitment call twice before agreeing to meet for coffee. By the end of that meeting, I had offered her a research endowment large enough to make her sit back silently for almost a full minute.
Now she looked at my burns and her mouth tightened.
“Vivian,” she said, “I’m here.”
I tried to speak.
“No,” she said. “Save your strength.”
But I needed her to hear it.
“She wanted my money.”
Dr. Ellis glanced toward the police officer standing near the curtain.
“She’s not getting it,” she said.
Then the drugs pulled me under.
When I woke, Marcus was sitting beside my bed.
His suit was wrinkled. His eyes were red. His hand hovered near mine but did not touch it.
For one stupid second, my heart reached for him.
Then I saw his suitcase in the corner.
The same suitcase he had rolled out of our house that morning.
No airline tag.
May you like
No hotel tag.
No evidence that he had ever gone to Chicago.
