Chapter 1

01

My name is Leo Henson. I was once a builder worth over a hundred million.

Four years ago, out of a soft spot for talent and some connection I could never quite name, I put a college girl named Pansy Fox through school.

Everyone around me said I was keeping a mistress, a pretty young thing on the side. I let it slide with a smile. Over those four years I sank more than five million into her, bit by bit. I paid for her to study abroad, saved her mother from a serious illness, even handed her the first bit of seed money for her own company.

Then came the winter for real estate. My financing dried up, and I went bankrupt overnight. Everyone turned their back on me. And worse than any of it, I was diagnosed with end-stage kidney failure.

Just as I lay in a hospital corridor, unable to even cover the dialysis fees, resigned to waiting for death, Pansy Fox, gone for two years, reappeared in a designer trench coat.

She was no longer that timid little girl. She was a woman who could throw a check for millions in my face and stake her claim on me like she owned me.

……

The air in the hospital corridor always carried that stubborn smell of disinfectant, mixed with cheap boxed lunches and the mildew of old bedding.

That smell used to be the one I hated most. Now it was the "air" I had to breathe every single day.

"Leo Henson. Is the Leo Henson from bed thirty-six here?"

The head nurse's voice was shrill and edged with impatience, cutting straight through the noisy crowd and into my ears.

I struggled to push myself up off the folding wire cot they'd wedged into the corridor as an extra bed.

Chronic under-dialysis had left me badly swollen all over. The Mr. Henson who once carried himself with such fire now looked like a dinner roll left too long to rise, waterlogged and puffed.

"Here… I'm here."

My voice was hoarse. I tried to force out something like an ingratiating smile.

The head nurse strode over with the billing slip and looked down at me.

Behind her, a few young nurses whispered among themselves. There was pity in their eyes, but more of it was the flat detachment of people watching a show.

In a place like this, where death is a daily sight, poverty is the worst disease of all.

"Mr. Henson, with today's dialysis fee and what you already owe, you're behind by fifty-eight hundred dollars now."

She gave the slip in her hand a little shake.

"The director said if you don't clear it today, we'll have to stop your dialysis slot tomorrow. You know how it is. Beds are tight here, and there's a whole line of people waiting outside."

"Fifty-eight hundred…"

I muttered it to myself, my hand reaching instinctively under the pillow for my wallet.

There was nothing in it but a few crumpled small bills. Less than two hundred dollars, all told.

"Ma'am, could you… could you give me another two days?"

I begged, my voice low and small.

"I'm raising the money. An old friend of mine said he'd wire it any day now."

"Mr. Henson, that's the third time you've told me that."

She sighed, her tone softening a little, though her stance stayed firm.

"It's not that we've got no heart. The hospital has its rules. This illness of yours is a money pit with no bottom. You used to be a big boss. You know how it works. No money, and the machine doesn't run."

The other patients' families threw looks my way.

Some were contempt, as if to say what's a man with no money doing getting treatment at all. Others were numb, because they were mired in the same swamp themselves.

My name is Leo Henson. I'm fifty-two this year.

Five years ago, fifty-eight hundred dollars was pocket change, the kind of thing left over from taking a client to a casual dinner out.

Back then I was one of the best-known builders in the city, holding several landmark projects, a driver at my door, no nobodies in my circle.

I'd pictured myself old someday, taking a rest cure in Switzerland, or fishing at a villa in Miami. The one thing I never pictured was this. Curled up like a stray dog in the noisiest corridor of a public hospital, hounded in front of everyone over money, just to buy a few more days of life.

"Before ten o'clock tomorrow morning. If the fee isn't paid, we'll have no choice but to clear the bed."

The head nurse delivered her final ultimatum and turned to leave.

I sank back onto the cot, and the wire frame let out a pitiful screech.

How had I come to this?

Some said it was the climate, the real estate market blowing up. Some said I'd overreached, expanded blindly.

But only I knew the last straw that broke the camel wasn't only money. It was people turning away.

The day I went bankrupt, my phone rang off the hook, all of it debt collectors.

And the day I was diagnosed with kidney failure, the phone went terrifyingly quiet.

The friends who'd once called me brother vanished, one after another, like they'd evaporated off the face of the earth.

I stared at the patches of paint flaking off the ceiling, and my stomach cramped.

I was hungry. But I couldn't bring myself to spend on food.

Two dinner rolls for five dollars from the little shop downstairs were my rations for the day.

"You hear about him? That old man used to be loaded. Kept a college girl on the side too, I think."

"Seriously? Doesn't look the type."

"Who knows. Just what he had coming. Neglected his family when he had money, and now that he's down, not one of them comes to lay eyes on him."

The woman keeping vigil at the next bed gossiped in a hushed voice, thinking I couldn't hear.

I gave a bitter laugh and closed my eyes.

Keeping a college girl?

Ha. It was a label I'd worn for four years, one I could never shake off.

And that so-called "college girl," my last hope, or you could say the biggest "joke" of my whole life, had been gone for two full years.

Just then, a commotion broke out at the far end of the corridor.

A few uniformed security guards were shoving a middle-aged woman loaded down with bags and bundles this way.

I made out that face, and my heart dropped hard.

It was my ex-wife. Althea Whitney.