Chapter 2

02

Althea hadn't come to bring money. She'd come for blood.

She wore a cashmere coat that was a season out of fashion, her hair a little wild, her face twisted with a kind of hysterical rage.

The security guard must have taken her for one of those relatives who make trouble in hospitals, and moved to stop her, but she screamed at the top of her lungs.

"I'm his wife! Since when is it a crime to check on my own husband?"

The truth was, we'd been divorced for a year.

On the eve of my bankruptcy, to salvage the last scraps of my assets before they were liquidated, and to keep the debt off her back, we'd gone through the divorce.

We'd agreed at the time that it was a "fake divorce," that we'd remarry once the storm blew over.

But after I was diagnosed with kidney failure, that "fake divorce" quietly became a real one.

The guard let go, and Althea came storming up to my bed.

"Leo Henson! You still have the nerve to lie here?"

She hurled the purse in her hand at me. It was a basic LV, a birthday gift I'd bought her three years ago.

The people around us went silent all at once, every eye fixed on this little domestic drama of ours.

"Why are you here?"

I pushed the bag off me, gritting through the pain in my body. "If you've got something to say, say it. Don't make a scene here."

"Me, make a scene? You think I want to?"

Althea's eyes were rimmed red, and she jabbed a finger at my face. "The collectors have shown up at my parents' door! They say another one of those loans you cosigned has blown up, and now they can't find you, so they've come after me! Leo Henson, how much longer are you going to keep dragging me down?"

My stomach clenched. "That guarantee... didn't we agree it'd be covered with the equipment left in the company?"

"Covered, my ass! That equipment was seized ages ago!"

Althea shrieked. "I don't even dare keep grocery money in my Venmo now, terrified it'll get frozen. And you? Hiding in a hospital, playing dead!"

"I'm not playing dead. I really am dying."

I pointed at the blood-streaked dialysis tube beside me. "Althea, whatever else, we were married twenty years..."

"Don't talk to me about being married!"

Althea cut me off, her eyes full of venom. "Twenty years? What did I get out of those twenty years? Back when you were riding high, where did all that money go? Huh? Don't tell me you don't know."

At the word money, everyone nearby craned their ears.

Althea let out a cold laugh and looked around, as if she meant to hold a public trial.

"You all be the judge. This man, too stingy to spend a dime on his own wife and kid at home, but out there he's bankrolling some college girl! Years of it, millions poured out to her, millions! And now it's caught up with him, he's bankrupt, he's sick, and where's that college girl? Ran off, didn't she! Not a shadow of her left!"

My face burned scalding hot, my heart clamped as if a hand had closed around it.

"Stop it..."

I begged weakly. "It wasn't like that. It wasn't keeping some mistress, it was..."

"It was what? Charity? Ha!"

Althea laughed until tears came. "Leo Henson, who do you think you're fooling? Bought her an apartment, paid for her mother's medical care, even set her up with her own company? You were never that generous with your own son! And now look, you're lying here waiting to die, can't even scrape together five thousand for treatment, so where's that 'goddaughter' of yours? Why isn't she coming to save you?"

Her words were like knives, each one landing exactly where it hurt most.

I had nothing to say.

Because most of what she said was true.

On that girl, I truly had poured out too much.

"Sign it."

Althea pulled a document from her bag and flung it in my face. "This is a statement giving up the property. That old dump isn't worth much, but it's the last roof I've got over my head. Sign it over to me completely, and we're even. From now on, keep your debts away from me."

That apartment had been my last way out, and it was the only thing left I could sell to pay for treatment.

I stared at the document, my hand shaking.

"I won't sign..."

I clenched my teeth. "If I sign, I'll have nothing left to treat this with."

"You won't sign?"

Althea suddenly pulled a bottle of pills from her pocket and made to tip them into her mouth. "You don't sign, I'll die right here in front of you! I'm going to be hounded to death by the collectors anyway, so I might as well die in front of you!"

It was a trick she'd used countless times, and it worked every time.

The guard and the nurses panicked and rushed in to grab at her.

The whole scene fell into chaos.

"I'll sign! I'll sign!"

I shouted in despair, forcing myself upright with everything I had left. "Give me a pen."

In that moment, I knew what I was signing wasn't my name. It was my own death notice.

The second Althea had the signed document, she put away the tears, smoothed her hair, and gave me one cold look.

"Leo Henson, don't blame me for being cruel. You're the fool. If you'd kept that five million back then, would you be lying here like a dog now?"

She left, hurrying out of the hospital as if fleeing a plague.

I sank limp into the bed, staring at the ceiling.

That's right. That five million.

If that five million were still here...