“Think about it,” I said. “No answer now.”
He nodded slowly.
Later that afternoon, I returned to my office for the first time since visiting Daniel’s house.
The building looked different.
Same marble lobby. Same green wall behind reception. Same silent elevators carrying people upward into climate-controlled confidence. But I could no longer unsee the distance between that lobby and the faded blue door on number 847.
Maren followed me into my office with a tablet and the careful expression she used when she had been waiting to tell me something unpleasant.
“The Toronto investors are annoyed,” she said.
“They’ll survive.”
“The zoning call moved to Thursday.”
“Good.”
“Karen from HR sent preliminary numbers. You were right to ask.”
I looked up.
“How bad?”
“Bad enough that she wants legal included before putting anything in writing.”
I leaned back slowly.
Maren hesitated.
“There’s also something else.”
I knew that tone.
“What?”
She placed a printed document on my desk.
“It concerns Lakeshore Medical Center. Daniel’s wife’s hospital.”
I picked up the page.
At first, I saw only names and columns. Board affiliations. Donor relations. Development partnerships. Then my gaze stopped on a familiar entry.
Whitcomb Urban Holdings.
My former husband’s company.
I felt the old coldness move through me.
“Why is Paul Whitcomb on this list?” I asked.
“His firm has been advising the hospital expansion project for eighteen months.”
My jaw tightened.
Paul.
The man who had once told me compassion was inefficient.
We had divorced six years earlier after I discovered he had been quietly using my company’s early contacts to build his own competing portfolio. Publicly, we were civil. Privately, I avoided his name whenever possible. He had a gift for appearing wherever money and influence gathered, smiling as though ethics were a decorative accessory.
“Keep going,” I said.
Maren tapped the page. “There’s a subcontractor tied to patient billing software implementation. Small company. Recently formed. I wouldn’t have noticed except Dr. Greer asked who handled payment communications.”
I read the company name.
Northline Administrative Solutions.
“Who owns it?”
“That’s the interesting part,” Maren said. “On paper, an LLC. Behind that, another LLC. But legal found a registered agent shared with Whitcomb Urban Holdings.”
The office went quiet.
“Are you telling me my ex-husband may be connected to the payment system that delayed Ana Carter’s care?”
“I’m saying there is enough overlap to ask questions.”
Careful questions, Dr. Greer had said.
My hands tightened around the paper.
“Ask them,” I said.
Maren did not move.
“Laura.”
I looked at her.
“You’re angry.”
“Yes.”
“You make mistakes when you’re angry.”
The words would have offended me from almost anyone else.
Maren had earned the right.
She had been with me eleven years. She knew every version of my silence.
“I won’t make this personal,” I said.
“It already is.”
I looked toward the city through the glass wall of my office. Towers rose beyond the window, steel and light and ambition. I had built a life high above the streets where Daniel carried groceries through the rain. I had told myself height meant vision.
Maybe sometimes it only meant distance.
“Then I’ll make it useful,” I said.
That evening, I visited Ana again.
Her color looked marginally better. Daniel was asleep in a chair beside her bed, his head tilted at an impossible angle, one hand still resting near hers. Mateo slept curled on a small sofa under a donated blanket. Lily was with the childcare nurse in the family room.
Ana saw me enter and lifted a finger to her lips, smiling faintly at Daniel.
“He finally surrendered,” she whispered.
“I won’t wake him.”
I placed a small bag on the table.
“Soup,” I said. “From a place near my office. And before you ask, yes, it is overpriced.”