Chapter 3 - The Number That Belonged to the Dead
I stared at Lucian’s phone until the young woman’s face blurred.
“What was her name?” I asked.
“Sofia.”
Something inside me shifted.
Not recognition exactly.
More like the sound of a key turning in a lock I had forgotten existed.
“Sofia Moretti?”
“Yes.”
I lowered the phone.
“I’ve heard that name.”
Lucian’s gaze sharpened.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think.”
“Don’t order me to think.”
He closed his eyes briefly.
“Sorry.”
Dr. Reyes stepped out of the lounge, giving us privacy.
I sat down again.
Seven years earlier, I had been twenty-four, healthy enough to complain about ordinary things and foolish enough to believe illness happened in stories about other people.
The first time I was hospitalized, I had spent nine days alone in a room that smelled like bleach and plastic tubing.
My mother had already died.
My father had been gone since I was twelve.
My sister, Claire, had been living in Seattle and was pregnant with her first child. I had told her not to come because I did not want to be the reason she crossed the country in her third trimester.
A volunteer had visited me on the fourth night.
A young woman with dark hair.
She had brought terrible vending-machine coffee and a deck of cards.
I remembered laughing because she cheated at gin rummy and denied it badly.
“She volunteered at St. Catherine’s,” I whispered.
Lucian did not move.
“She used to visit patients?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Seven years ago.”
His face lost color.
I looked again at the photograph.
The memory came back not as a picture, but as details.
A silver bracelet with a tiny star.
A habit of tapping two fingers against her coffee cup.
A voice saying, If you ever need to talk to someone who won’t tell you to be strong, call me.
I stood so fast the room swayed.
“Oh my God.”
Lucian reached toward me, then stopped.
“She gave me her number,” I said.
His eyes closed.
For the first time since I had met him, Lucian Moretti looked like a man being hurt in real time.
“I saved it,” I continued. “No name. Just the number. I don’t even know why I didn’t put her name in. I think I was embarrassed. I thought if I saved ‘Sofia from hospital,’ I’d feel like someone who needed rescuing.”
Lucian sat down.
I had never seen a powerful person look smaller.
“She came home talking about a patient once,” he said.
My skin prickled.
“What patient?”
“A young woman with paint on her fingernails who refused to call her sister because she didn’t want to frighten her.”
I stopped breathing.
He looked at me.
“She said you were the most stubborn person she had met all month.”
A laugh broke out of me, half sob, half disbelief.
“That sounds like her.”
“You remember her?”
“Not enough.”
His expression tightened.
“I remember enough to wish I had known who I was texting.”
For a moment, we were not a billionaire and a dying woman.
We were two people connected by someone who had been dead for seven years and had somehow placed a number between us like a thread waiting to be pulled.
“How did she die?” I asked.
Lucian looked toward the windows.
“She had an undiagnosed vascular condition. It caused an aortic rupture.”
My stomach turned.
“At St. Catherine’s?”
“Yes.”
“Was it sudden?”
A long silence.
“Not as sudden as they claimed.”
I heard the bitterness beneath the words.
“What does that mean?”
“It means there were warning signs. She had chest pain for months. They called it anxiety. She fainted twice. They called it dehydration. By the time someone ordered the right imaging, it was too late.”
I looked down at my hands.
The hospital wristband was gone, but I could still feel the ghost of it.
“Is that why you invest in medical companies?”
“One reason.”
“And why Dr. Reyes reacted to St. Catherine’s?”
His eyes returned to mine.
“Because my company has been reviewing a potential acquisition involving one of their diagnostic labs.”
My chest tightened.
“What lab?”
“CrownPath Diagnostics.”
I knew the name.
It was printed on the bottom of almost every pathology report in my medical file.
“Lucian.”
He saw the answer on my face before I spoke.
“My tests went through CrownPath.”
The air changed.
He stood immediately and called Dr. Reyes back in.
Within twenty minutes, three people were working from laptops in the lounge.
Not because I asked them to save me.
Because a thread had become a rope.
Dr. Reyes requested my records with my permission. I signed the release on a tablet with a hand that would not stop shaking.
At 10:43 p.m., a preliminary packet arrived.
She reviewed it in silence.
Lucian paced once, then forced himself to stop.
I watched every movement in her face.
At last, she looked up.
“Ms. Carter, I need to be very precise.”
“Amelia.”
“Amelia. Your original diagnosis appears to be based on a pathology sample taken three years and eleven months ago.”
“Yes.”
“The report identifies progressive infiltrative cardiopulmonary fibrosis.”
“That’s what I have.”
“Maybe.”
That word again.
Dangerous.
Bright.
I gripped the edge of the sofa.
“What’s wrong with the report?”
“There are two accession numbers.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Each sample should have one unique tracking number. Your report references one in the header and another in the lab audit trail.”
Lucian stopped moving.
“Could it be clerical?” he asked.
“Yes. It could also mean the sample was relabeled, amended, merged, or linked incorrectly.”
“Can you tell?”
“Not from this packet.”
I looked from one to the other.
“So I might have been diagnosed from someone else’s sample?”
Dr. Reyes did not soften it.
“It is possible.”
I felt sick.
“Possible enough to matter?”
“Yes.”
The room went silent.
Four years.
Four years of drugs that made my hands tremble.
Four years of worsening breathlessness.
Four years of turning my life into a waiting room.
Then another thought arrived.
“If the diagnosis was wrong,” I said, “why did I get sicker?”
Dr. Reyes nodded.
“That is exactly why we need to move carefully. You are sick. I am not disputing that. But you may be sick with something different.”
“Something treatable?”
She hesitated.
“Potentially.”
Hope moved closer.
I wanted to throw something at it.
Lucian looked at me but said nothing.
No promises.
He had learned.
“What do you need?” I asked.
“A new cardiac MRI. CT angiography. Blood work. Echocardiography. Possibly a biopsy depending on what we find.”
“How long?”
“We can begin tonight.”
“No.”
Lucian’s jaw tightened, but he kept quiet.
“I’m not spending my seven days under fluorescent lights,” I said.
Dr. Reyes sat across from me.
“What if I tell you the tests could change the meaning of those seven days?”
“Then I’ll tell you I’ve heard versions of that sentence for four years.”
She nodded.
“Fair.”
I stood.
“I’ll do them tomorrow morning. Four hours. No more.”
Dr. Reyes looked at Lucian.
He shook his head slightly.
“My decision,” I said.
“Your decision,” he agreed.
We left the restaurant just after midnight.
The city glittered below us as the elevator descended.
In the lobby, Lucian’s security team waited at a distance.
I turned to him.
“My list.”
“What about it?”
“Item three. My mother’s lemon cake.”
“At one in the morning?”
“She used to make it when she couldn’t sleep.”
“Do you have the recipe?”
“In my apartment.”
He studied me.
Then he took off his tuxedo jacket and handed it to a security officer.
“What are you doing?”
“Buying lemons.”
At 1:22 a.m., one of the richest men in New York stood in my kitchen wearing rolled-up white shirtsleeves and staring suspiciously at a bag of flour.
“You own hotels,” I said. “Surely you can bake.”
“I own companies that employ people who can bake.”
“That is not the same skill.”
“I’m learning.”
He cracked an egg too hard and dropped shell into the bowl.
I laughed so violently I had to sit down.
For the next hour, we ruined one cake, nearly burned a second, and produced a third that tasted close enough to memory that I cried after the first bite.
Lucian did not ask why.
He simply ate his piece beside me at the kitchen table.
At 2:47, my phone rang.
Dr. Talbot.
My doctor.
I answered.
“Amelia?” His voice sounded strained. “I received a request tonight for your complete file.”
“Yes.”
“From Moretti Medical Ventures.”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Why?”
I looked at Lucian.
“Because another doctor had questions.”
Silence.
Then Dr. Talbot said something that made my skin go cold.
“You need to stop them from opening the CrownPath archive.”
I stood.
“What?”
His breathing changed.
“Amelia, listen to me. There are things in that archive that have nothing to do with your prognosis.”
“What things?”
He did not answer.
“Dr. Talbot, what things?”
The line went dead.
Lucian was already on his feet.
I looked at him across my mother’s old kitchen table, the unfinished lemon cake between us.
May you like
And for the first time, I understood that whatever had happened to my medical file was not simply a mistake.
Someone was afraid of us finding it.
