The cab turned onto the street leading to the hospital, and Elias felt his mouth go dry. The massive hospital building emerged from behind the corner. He asked the driver to stop at the main entrance, paid, stepped out, and stood in the biting wind for a minute, gathering his courage before going inside.
The lobby was crowded and noisy, like a bus station. People with tense faces stood in line at reception, sat on hard benches, talked on phones, or cried in corners. Elias passed them by, following the signs to the indicated wing: third floor, intensive care unit, heavy doors with a keypad lock.
He stopped, not knowing what to do, and then the door opened from the inside. A woman in her 40s, in blue scrubs, with a tired face and a piercing gaze, looked at him, and he knew it was Vera.
«Elias Vane?»
«Yes.»
«Come with me. We need to talk before you see her.»
She led him aside to a small corner by the window, where there were two plastic chairs and a dusty potted plant. She looked around to make sure no one was listening and began to speak quickly and quietly.
«Officially, she was in a car accident. That’s her husband’s version, and that’s what’s recorded in the paperwork. Unofficially, it’s very different. I’ve been working here for 12 years, and I’ve seen enough to tell an accident from a beating.»
She paused, gauging his reaction.
«She was admitted four days ago with multiple traumas, internal bleeding, and a concussion. Her husband came once, stayed for five minutes, and left. Since then, he hasn’t even called to ask about her condition.»
Elias listened, and something dark rose inside him, something he hadn’t felt in a long time. Not since 1998, when his crew was swindled out of their pay, and he, with three other cheated men, went to settle accounts with the people responsible. That was the first time he understood he was capable of things he had never thought of before.
«Why did you call me specifically?» Elias asked.
Vera looked him in the eyes. «Because she was calling for you. When they brought her in, she was unconscious, but she kept repeating one word. ‘Daddy.’ Not Julian, not Mama, not a friend. Daddy.»
His throat tightened so much it was hard to breathe. Three years of silence. Three years of resentment and distance. And when things got truly bad, she called for him. For him, not for the husband who had promised her everything and given her only pain.
«I want to see her.»
«First, hear it all,» Vera insisted. «This isn’t the first time she’s been in here. In the last eight months, she’s been hospitalized three times. The first time with a fractured arm. The second with cracked ribs. Each time, the husband came, brought some papers, talked to the director, and she was discharged early.»
«I tried to talk to her,» Vera continued, «but she only cried and begged me not to tell anyone. She was afraid. Very afraid.»
«Afraid of what?»
«Of him. And not just him—his whole family. His father, Silas Sterling, owns a chain of malls. He has connections everywhere. An uncle in the district attorney’s office. They can make any report disappear before an investigator even sees it. She understood that, and that’s why she stayed quiet.»
Elias stood up. His legs didn’t want to obey him, but he forced himself to take a step, then another.
«Take me to her.»
Vera nodded and walked ahead, swiping her badge to open the doors. They walked down a long hallway saturated with the smell of antiseptic and misfortune, passing rooms with closed doors and monitors beeping their monotonous count of other people’s lives. Then Vera stopped in front of one of the doors and turned back.
«Prepare yourself. It looks bad.»
She pushed the door open, and Elias stepped inside.
On the bed, wrapped in tubes and wires, lay his daughter. His Maya, whom he used to toss toward the ceiling, catching her with his big hands while she shrieked with joy. Now, nothing was left of that little girl.
Her face was pale, almost gray, eyes closed with bruises around them that no makeup could hide. Her lips were split, and her neck was held by a brace under which purple marks were visible.
He had seen those marks before. He knew what they were from. Fingers. Human fingers squeezing a throat until the victim stops moving.
Elias collapsed into the chair by the bed and took her thin, cold, weak hand. The same hand he had held 30 years ago in the delivery room when the nurse brought him a small bundle and told him it was a girl.
He had cried with happiness then. He was crying now too, but for something completely different.
For a long time, he just sat there and looked at her, listening to the rhythmic beep of the machines and the sound of his own blood in his ears. He thought about how everything could have been different if he had gone to the wedding, if he had insisted on meeting Julian first, if he hadn’t let her drift so far away.
But the past cannot be changed. You can only try to fix the future. And for that, he had two months, maybe three.
He stood up, walked out of the room, and found Vera waiting in the hallway.
«Where are her things?»
«In the floor storage locker. The husband didn’t pick them up.»
«I need her phone.»
Vera hesitated, but then she nodded and walked away. A few minutes later, she returned with a clear plastic bag containing clothes, a purse, and a phone with a cracked screen.
Elias took the phone and pressed the button. The screen was shattered, but it lit up. It had 20% battery left and no passcode. He opened the gallery and started looking at the photos.
Maya happy at some resort. Maya with a glass of wine at a restaurant. Maya and Julian on a yacht. Everything beautiful, everything perfect, everything fake.
And then the videos appeared. One of them was dated last month. He pressed play.
On the screen appeared the face of a young, attractive man with arrogant eyes and the smile of someone used to getting everything he wants. Off-camera, a woman’s crying could be heard, along with another person’s drunken laughter.
«Maya, come on, say something for Daddy,» the man sneered. «Tell him you fell down on your own.»
The camera panned, and Elias saw his daughter with a split lip, her makeup running, with the eyes of a cornered animal. She was looking at someone off-camera, someone she feared deeply, and she spoke with a dead voice.
«I fell down on my own.»
The laughter off-camera got louder. Several female voices joined in.
«See, Daddy-in-law? Your little girl is fine with me. Try and come fix things. You’re just a rig worker from the sticks, right? What are you gonna do, file a report?»
More laughter. Then the video cut off.
Elias stood in the hospital hallway, staring at the black screen of the broken phone. His hands were not shaking. He was already beyond fear, anger, and despair. He was in that place where only cold clarity remains, and the understanding of what must be done.
He pulled out his own phone, found a number in his contacts he hadn’t dialed in 17 years, and pressed call. The rings went on one after another, and he was starting to think the number was dead when a hoarse, deep voice with a slight southern accent answered.
«Hello?»
«Marcus, it’s Elias. From the Savannah docks. Do you remember 2007?»
A long pause, then a sigh that sounded like a laugh.
«17 years, Elias. 17 years. I’ve been waiting for this call. You know I always said, one call, any debt. You pulled me out of that fire alive. Speak, brother. Who are we tearing down?»
Elias looked at the closed door of the intensive care unit where his daughter lay. He looked at the phone with the video that was now burned into his memory forever, and spoke only one name.
«The Sterlings.»
Vera found him in the hospital cafeteria on the first floor two hours after that call. Elias was sitting at a plastic table by the window. In front of him was a cup of instant coffee that had gone cold long ago, covered with a thin film.
He wasn’t looking at the coffee. He wasn’t looking out the window. He wasn’t looking anywhere in particular. He was simply sitting and waiting, like a man who has already made a decision and is now watching the universe rearrange itself around it.
The nurse sat down across from him, placed her hands on the table, and for a while, she remained silent, studying his face. Then she asked, in a low voice, almost a whisper, «What did you do, Elias?»
«Nothing special. I called a person I once helped.»
«You called? And what’s going to happen now?»
He finally looked up at her. Vera saw something in his eyes that unsettled her. Not anger. Not fury. Not thirst. Something much more terrifying. Calm. The absolute icy calm of a man who knows exactly what he is doing.
«Now there will be justice,» he said. «Not revenge. Not violence. Not some 1998-style shootout. Just justice. The truth will come out, and people will answer for what they’ve been doing for years.»
«I don’t understand.»
«You don’t need to. It’s better if you forget you called me and that we spoke. If anyone asks, you’re just a nurse doing your job. Understood?»
Vera nodded slowly. It was clear she wanted to ask a thousand more questions. But she had worked in that hospital long enough to understand that there are situations where it’s better not to know too much. There are people around whom things happen that no one talks about out loud later.
«How is she?» Elias asked.
«No change. The doctors say the next 48 hours will be decisive. If her body can overcome the inflammation, and her kidneys don’t fail, there’s hope.»
«What percentage of hope?»
«Roughly 50%. Maybe a bit less.»
«50%?»
50-50. Elias thought about the irony hidden in those numbers. The doctors had given him almost a 100% guarantee of death in a few months, while his daughter balanced on the edge with the odds of a coin toss.
And he could do nothing to change those odds. Not with money. Not with connections. Not even with that call he had just made. Medicine works by its own laws. And no incriminating file on rich families will make cancer cells stop or a failing organ start working again.
«Can I be with her? Just sit by her side?»
«Officially, visitors aren’t allowed in intensive care. But I can take you back in if you act discreetly. And don’t draw attention. Just for a while.»
They went back up to the third floor. They passed through the same heavy doors. In the room, nothing had changed. The same machines. The same rhythmic beeping. The same pale figure on the bed that was once his little girl.