Luis Lynnt Mariana

My husband signed my death warrant with a smile. I was lying in a hospital bed, my body burning with fever, when Dr. Adrian Cross walked into my room with his arm around another woman. "Eleanor," he said, not even glancing at the IV in my arm. "This is Dr. Sloane Pierce. She's taking over your case." The woman looked at me like I was a stain on the floor. "Stage three. Aggressive. Honestly, the treatment plan barely matters at this point." I gripped the bedsheet. "Adrian. I'm your wife." He finally looked at me. And he laughed. "You were a charity case I married because your father begged me on his deathbed. Don't flatter yourself." He turned to Sloane and kissed her temple. "Sign the DNR. She's not worth the bed." The whole ward went silent. Nurses froze in the doorway. A young intern whispered, "Isn't that Mrs. Cross? The one who—" Adrian cut her off. "She's nobody. Stop wasting resources." He pulled out my discharge papers and dropped them on my chest. "Get out by morning. Westfield Memorial doesn't treat dead weight." Then he walked out, his hand sliding down to Sloane's waist, the two of them laughing about dinner reservations. I lay there in the dark, listening to my own heart monitor beep. And I smiled. Because Adrian Cross had just made the worst mistake of his pathetic little career. He didn't know that Westfield Memorial—the hospital he ran like a king, the hospital that just threw me out to die— was about to receive its new owner. Me. I slowly reached for my phone on the side table. My fingers were shaking, but my voice was steady when the line connected. "Marcus. It's Eleanor." The man on the other end—the most feared corporate attorney on the East Coast—went quiet for a full three seconds. "Ms. Whitmore." His voice cracked with emotion. "We've been searching for you for two years. Your grandfather's estate—" "I know." I closed my eyes. "Activate the acquisition. All of it." "Ma'am... that's a four-billion-dollar transaction. Are you certain?" I looked at the discharge papers crumpled on my chest. At the DNR order Adrian wanted me to sign. "Buy the hospital," I said softly. "Buy the building. Buy the ground it stands on." "And the staff, Ms. Whitmore?" I pulled the IV needle out of my own arm, the way only a trained surgeon could—clean, painless, precise. Because that was the part Adrian forgot. Before I was his "charity case," I was the youngest board-certified oncologist in the country. "Keep the good ones," I said. "Fire the rest." I ended the call and stared at the ceiling. By the time the sun came up, Dr. Adrian Cross would still think I was a dying nobody crawling out of his hospital. He had no idea I'd be walking back in through the front door. As the owner.