He looked at her.
Marlene’s expression softened by one degree. “Jason, this is not a company you can acquire and restructure. These are children.”
“I know that too.”
“Then start acting like it.”
Before Jason could answer, David Ross stepped out of the conference room.
His face told Jason the news before his mouth did.
“We found Emily Carter,” David said.
Jason’s lungs locked.
“Where is she?”
“St. Agnes Long-Term Care in Queens.”
“Long-term care?”
David glanced toward the office where the boys slept.
“She was in a car accident almost three months ago. A bad one. Hit by a truck on the BQE. She survived, but she suffered a traumatic brain injury. She’s been in a coma since.”
Jason gripped the wall.
David continued quietly. “She had no close family listed. No spouse. No parents alive. But there was one emergency contact in the old paperwork from her apartment.”
Jason already knew.
“You,” David said.
For the first time since he was a boy, Jason Miller looked genuinely afraid.
Part 2
The drive to St. Agnes took forty-three minutes, and Jason remembered every second of it.
Liam and Lucas sat in the back of his black Range Rover, strapped into car seats Claire had somehow obtained in under an hour. They held hands between the seats. Lucas clutched a stuffed stegosaurus with one missing eye. Liam stared out the window at the gray city sliding past.
“Are we going to Mommy?” Liam asked.
Jason looked at him in the rearview mirror.
“Yes.”
“Is she sleeping?”
Jason’s fingers tightened around the steering wheel.
“Yes,” he said. “But doctors are taking care of her.”
“Mommy sleeps a lot now,” Lucas whispered.
Jason glanced at him.
“You’ve seen her?”
Liam nodded. “Mrs. Alvarez took us. She lives across the hall. But then she got sick and went to her daughter’s house. Mommy said if Mrs. Alvarez couldn’t help, we had to come find you.”
Jason felt the full weight of the past three months settle on his chest. Emily, unconscious in a hospital. The boys shuffled between neighbors. A folded note waiting for the day all other options collapsed.
And him.
In his tower. In his custom suits. Angry about delayed contracts and underperforming divisions while his sons were learning how to survive without him.
At St. Agnes, the halls smelled of disinfectant, old coffee, and the quiet sorrow of families waiting for miracles. Jason had donated to hospitals before. He had attended charity galas, shaken hands with surgeons, smiled for cameras beside plaques bearing his company’s name.
He had never stood helpless at the foot of a hospital bed.
Emily Carter looked smaller than he remembered.
Her dark blond hair had been brushed away from her face. A thin scar curved near her temple. Tubes and monitors surrounded her, their soft mechanical rhythms making the room feel both alive and unbearably still.
The twins moved before Jason did.
“Mommy,” Liam whispered.
Lucas climbed onto the chair beside the bed and carefully placed the stuffed dinosaur against Emily’s arm.
Jason could not move.
In his memory, Emily was all motion: laughing behind a diner counter, dancing barefoot in her tiny apartment while rain hit the fire escape, turning toward him with flour on her cheek because she had tried to bake biscuits from scratch and failed spectacularly.
Now she lay silent because life had struck her down while he was busy pretending the past had no claim on him.
Liam looked back.
“Can she hear us?”