On a sleepless American night, with the Seattle skyline burning in neon and the glow of Harborview Medical Center pulsing like a heartbeat against the dark, Callum Merrick’s cheap cell phone exploded to life at 2:00 a.m. The sound was too sharp, too bright, a digital scream that tore through the small living room of his low-rent apartment in south Seattle.

He came awake like a soldier under fire.

One second he was dead asleep on his frayed secondhand sofa, the TV muttering silently in the corner, a half-finished American beer sweating a ring of condensation on the chipped coffee table. The next second his body snapped upright, muscles tense, lungs already pulling fast air as if he’d been running. Years of waking to every small sound from his daughter’s room had wired him to bolt out of dreams in an instant.

Hazel.

The thought hit faster than the ringtone.

His gaze shot to the old digital clock under the TV: 2:00 a.m. Exactly. A time when good news never called. A time reserved for police, hospitals, and the kind of emergencies that cracked a person’s life down the middle.

The phone kept buzzing, rattling against a stack of unpaid bills.

He snatched it up, heart thudding hard enough to make his vision tic at the edges. The number on the screen was unfamiliar, some random Washington area code, but that meant nothing at this hour. A thousand worst-case scenarios burned through his mind in a single second—drunk drivers, house fires, some freak accident on I-5, anything that could have happened to a ten-year-old girl having a sleepover on the other side of the city.

He hit accept.

“Hello?” His voice came out rough, sleep-thick, but already bracing.

“Please. I need you.”

It was a woman’s voice. Not Hazel. Not the kindly older neighbor whose number he’d left with Hazel’s friend’s parents. This voice was older, frayed, choked with something that sounded a lot like raw terror. Even through lousy speaker quality, he could hear the way it scraped along the edges of panic.

“Who is this?” he asked, already standing, already reaching for his boots.

“Harborview Hospital,” she gasped. “Room three-oh-two. Please come. Please, I—I don’t want to be alone.”

He froze halfway into his boot, mind stumbling. Harborview. The big regional trauma center where the worst of the worst went. The place you saw on the evening news when the anchor talked about life flights and critical condition.

“I think you’ve got the wrong—”

“James?” Her voice cracked right down the middle on the name. “James, please, I’m so scared. I’m so scared and I don’t want to—” The rest dissolved into wet, broken sounds that punched right through his chest.

His hand tightened around the phone. He could have hung up. Any sane person would have. He didn’t know this woman, didn’t know what room three-oh-two meant, didn’t know who James was or why he wasn’t answering.

But something in that voice—something primitive, like a wild animal trying not to scream while the trap closed—hit the part of him he’d buried four years ago in an American cemetery under a neat headstone with his wife’s name on it.

He remembered that particular cold, the way it seeped into the bones when the world had just ended and the only thing worse than the fear was the sheer loneliness of having no one’s hand to hold.

He swallowed.

“I’m not James,” he said quietly. “But I can come.”

There was a pause. Even through the static he could hear her labored breathing, like someone clinging to the edge of a cliff with bloodied fingers.

“Please,” she whispered. “Just… don’t let me be alone.”

“Okay,” he said, before he could talk himself out of it. “Just try to breathe, all right? I’m on my way.”

The call ended with a soft click that echoed too loudly in the cramped room.

For a second he stayed frozen, phone still pressed to his ear. Then logic crashed back in, loud and rude.

What the hell am I doing?

He had work in the morning, a busted transmission waiting at Merrick’s Motors, the tiny auto shop he kept afloat with sweat and stubbornness. He had to pick Hazel up from her friend Piper’s house at nine. He had exactly seventy-four dollars in his checking account and one reliable thing in his life: routine. He did not have time to drive to a hospital in the middle of the night for a stranger who had dialed a wrong number while looking for some man named James.

His gaze drifted, as it always did, to the shelf above the TV.

Two photos sat there, side by side. On the left, Rosalind, frozen forever at thirty-six, laughing at something off-camera, the Seattle sunshine turning her hair to copper fire. On the right, Hazel at five, gap-toothed and beaming, holding a cardboard kindergarten “diploma” like it was a Harvard degree.

It was for them that he worked double shifts. For them that he skipped meals and patched his boots with duct tape instead of replacing them. For them that he tried, every single day, to be just stable enough that nothing ever broke quite as catastrophically as it had the night a drunk driver rearranged their future on a highway outside Tacoma.

The phone felt heavier in his hand.

Who was this woman at Harborview? Why was she clinging to a man who didn’t answer? Why was she alone in that big hospital whose name most Americans knew from the national news when something truly awful hit the Pacific Northwest?

He didn’t have answers.

His hands, traitors to his doubts, were already reaching for his keys.

He called Mrs. Constance Bellamy, the elderly widow across the hall who had taken it upon herself to adopt them both after Rosalind died. She answered on the third ring, bright and weirdly alert, as if she’d just been waiting for someone to need her.

“Callum, dear? Is everything all right? Is it Hazel?”

“No, and yes, and I hope so,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “She’s fine. She’s at her friend’s place, remember? Listen, I—this is going to sound crazy, but I got a phone call. From a woman at Harborview. She… thought I was someone else. She sounds bad. Really bad. I need to check on her.”

He could hear Mrs. Bellamy’s quiet inhale.

“Well,” she said, with the kind of old-fashioned American firmness that had seen wars and recessions and too many funerals, “if the Good Lord put that call in your hands, He had a reason. I’ll keep an eye on your door. If Hazel comes home early or anything happens, I’ll call you right away.”

“Thank you,” he murmured. “I’m sorry for waking you.”

“Nonsense. Go,” she said. “No one should be alone in a hospital at this hour.”

Ten minutes later he was stepping out into the pre-dawn chill, his breath hanging in the air over the cracked concrete walkway. Seattle lay stretched around him in a haze of sodium-yellow streetlights and neon reflections, the Space Needle a distant spike in the sky. Somewhere over on First Hill, Harborview’s glass windows were probably glowing like a ship in the night.

His truck, a beat-up Ford that had seen better presidents come and go, coughed to life with a familiar protest. He guided it into near-empty streets, the traffic lights changing dutifully for a city that was mostly asleep.

He drove through the kind of quiet that only happened in big American cities for a sliver of time between last call and first shift. The highway lanes were an empty ribbon. A freight train rumbled in the distance. An all-night diner flashed an OPEN sign to nobody.

With every mile, his sanity questioned him.

You’re on your way to a trauma center because a stranger dialed the wrong number. You don’t know what you’re walking into. You don’t know her situation. She could be anyone. This could be anything.

He gripped the steering wheel harder.

On the radio, some talk station host was arguing about healthcare and insurance deductibles and the cost of chemo in the United States. He snapped it off. The silence left room for the memory of Rosalind’s last night, the hum of monitors, the way nurses moved quickly but softly, the smell of antiseptic and something metallic underneath.

He had never liked hospitals. No one who’d truly needed one ever did.

By the time he pulled into the parking structure next to Harborview, dawn was smearing pale light along the eastern horizon, turning the clouds over Puget Sound into streaks of bruised purple and gray. The hospital rose above him, all concrete and glass, American flags snapping in the damp wind near the entrance.

His truck looked embarrassingly out of place among the new SUVs and leased sedans, like a stray mutt wandering into a purebred show.

Inside, the fluorescent lights washed every face the same color. The air smelled like disinfectant, coffee, and the strange metallic tang of recycled breath. He asked for room 302, got a quick, practiced set of directions, and followed an elevator up to the third floor.

The hallway was too bright and too quiet, except for the soft beeping of monitors and the occasional squeak of rubber soles. Signs on the walls bore terms he only half understood: Oncology, Hematology, Infusion Center.

Room 302’s door stood slightly ajar.

He stopped just outside, hand hovering at the wood, suddenly aware of the surreal stupidity of his situation. He could still turn around. He could still go home, pretend the phone had never rung, blame it on a strange dream.

But the soft, steady beep of a heart monitor just beyond the door hooked into something deep in him.

He knocked once, gently, and pushed the door open.

The woman in the bed looked like she had been sculpted out of the hospital’s too-white light. Copper hair spilled over the pillow, though it had a thinness to it that hinted at recent losses. Her skin was pale, almost translucent, but the bones beneath were fine and strong. Early thirties, he guessed, though illness made ages slippery. Even stripped of makeup and designer armor, she was striking in a way that didn’t belong in a place where people came to break.

Her eyes, a clear stormy blue, snapped to the door.

“You’re not James,” she said, immediately, accusation and disappointment and the ghost of something like relief tangled together.

“No,” he admitted, stepping inside, suddenly very aware of his faded T-shirt and worn jeans. “I’m… Callum. You dialed the wrong number tonight.”

Annoyance flickered across her exhausted face. Then another emotion pushed in behind it, something fragile and unexpectedly raw.

“I really am that pathetic, huh?” she murmured, looking toward the window. “Dialing strangers at two in the morning.”

“You sounded scared,” he said, because anything else felt dishonest. “I couldn’t just stay on my couch.”

She studied him for a long second, as if trying to place where, exactly, the universe kept people like him. Then she let out a small sound that was half-bitter laugh, half-sob.

“I’m Vivian,” she said. “Vivian Marlo. And it seems the universe sent me a mechanic instead of a useless ex-boyfriend.”

The name hit him like a splash of cold water.

Marlo.

As in Marlo Communications. The giant telecom corporation with billboards on the freeway and Super Bowl ads that cost more than he’d earn in five lifetimes. The company people cursed when their Wi-Fi went out, the one the local news talked about whenever mergers or layoffs were in the headlines.

He had skimmed past the name a dozen times in national business segments and then dismissed it because those stories belonged to another planet, one with private jets and Manhattan boardrooms and men in suits who never had grease under their fingernails.

Seeing the heiress of that world in a hospital gown, an IV taped to the back of her hand, knocked something sideways inside him.

“I’ve seen your name on… on the news,” he admitted, awkwardly. “Marlo Communications.”

“Congratulations,” she said dryly. “You’ve officially met the most profitable leukemia patient in the Pacific Northwest.”

The word leukemia landed in his gut like a thrown wrench.

He had known it was bad. Oncology floor, third shift, Harborview. But that word carried a particular American weight, a million fundraising campaigns and pink or orange ribbons, GoFundMe pages and desperate local news pleas for help with medical bills.

His voice felt thick.

“Do you have anyone I can call?” he asked. “Family? Friends?”

She looked down at the thin hospital blanket, fingers picking at a stray thread.

“My father passed last year,” she said quietly. “My mother moved back to Europe. As for friends…”

Her gaze flicked to the empty vinyl chair beside the bed.

“The kind of people who say they’ll always be there don’t usually show up at 2:00 a.m. in an oncology ward,” she finished, with a brittle little shrug. “James and I… broke up three weeks ago. Tonight the doctor said the next forty-eight hours would be bad. I called him anyway.” Her lips twisted. “Apparently that was optimistic of me.”

He hovered near the doorway, unsure if he should step closer or back away. He had planned to check that she wasn’t literally dying alone and then slip out, another anonymous face passing through her nightmare.

But she looked so small under all that sterile white, so strangely defenseless for someone whose last name could buy half the block he lived on and not even check the receipt.

“Do you want me to call someone else?” he asked. “A board member, an assistant, I don’t know… someone from your company?”

She shook her head, wincing a little at the movement.

“No,” she said. “Just… just sit. For a minute. If you can.”

The request was simple. The way she said it tugged at something more complicated.

Before he could answer, the door opened and a tall woman in a white coat swept in, her steel-gray hair pulled back in the kind of efficient low bun that said she had long since traded sleep for shifts.

“Miss Marlo, we have your latest results,” she said, brisk but not unkind. Then she saw Callum and gave him a quick clinical once-over. “And you are?”

“Callum Merrick,” he said, standing straighter without meaning to. “I’m… a friend.”

The lie surprised him with how easily it came out. Maybe because saying I’m a stranger who showed up because your patient dialed wrong didn’t feel like something that would comfort anyone.

The doctor nodded once, accepting it. “I’m Dr. Penelope Strand,” she said. “Miss Marlo, your labs confirm what we were concerned about. The current regimen is no longer suppressing the leukemia the way we’d hoped. We need to adjust treatment. Quickly.”

Vivian’s jaw tightened. Her fingers, clamped around the blanket, turned white at the knuckles. But she didn’t cry or panic or launch into a dramatic scene the way he’d expect from someone who had grown up on the front pages of national business magazines.

“How bad?” she asked, voice surprisingly calm.

Dr. Strand’s expression softened, the way doctors’ faces do when they have to walk that swim lane between truth and kindness.

“The next forty-eight hours are critical,” she said. “We’re going to start you on a stronger drug combination. It gives you a fighting chance, but it comes with greater risks. Organ stress. Infection. We’ll monitor you closely, but I want you prepared.”

Prepared. The American hospital euphemism for this might not work.

Out in the hallway, after answering a few more clinical questions, Dr. Strand pulled Callum aside.

“You said you’re a friend,” she said, looking him dead in the eye. “Even if you’re not family, she wants you here. Emotional support can be as important as medication.”

He swallowed.

“So when she said she was scared,” he murmured, “she meant… death scared.”

“Yes,” Dr. Strand said simply. “She did.”

When the doctor left him standing alone in the bright, sterile hallway, the weight of what he’d stepped into finally slammed into him. He stood for a moment with his hand braced on the wall, listening to the beeps and the distant roll of a cart somewhere.

He should call Mrs. Bellamy and reassure her. He should double-check the pick-up time for Hazel. He should go home, crawl back onto his lumpy sofa, and try to salvage whatever was left of the night before his shift at the shop.

Instead he went back into room 302.

Vivian looked smaller already, somehow, as if the knowledge of what was coming had stripped away the last of her public armor. Her face was turned toward the window, toward the foggy hint of the American flag he knew was flying out front, but her eyes were unfocused.

“Did the doctor tell you the dangerous part?” she whispered as he stepped closer. “Most people run when they hear it.”

“I’m not most people,” he said, pulling the chair closer to the bed. “Besides, I already drove across half of Seattle. It would be rude to bail now.”

That won a faint, almost startled smile out of her.

“So, Callum Merrick,” she said, watching him as if trying to figure out what box to put him in. “What’s the most important thing in your life?”

“My daughter,” he said, without hesitation. “Hazel. She’s ten.”

A flicker of something like longing crossed her face.

“Tell me about her,” Vivian said.

So he did.

He talked about Hazel’s obsession with vintage American muscle cars and how she could tell a Mustang from a Camaro from two blocks away. About her science project on engine efficiency, about the way she’d insisted on helping him change oil last summer until she’d fallen asleep upright on a milk crate in the shop. He told her about Sunday movie nights, the one ritual they had never broken since Rosalind died, even on the worst weeks.

In return, she let pieces of her world slip out.

She talked about being the only child of Edmund Marlo, who had come to the United States with nothing but a high school education and built one of the biggest telecom empires on the West Coast. About boardrooms full of men who smiled tight and sharp at her, waiting for her to prove she wasn’t as capable as the father they’d worshipped.

She talked about the ex-boyfriend who had vanished the day “acute myeloid leukemia” became part of her vocabulary. About friends who drifted away when her hair started falling out, when parties turned into infusion appointments and Europe vacations turned into weeks at Harborview.

That strange, late-night conversation unfolded like they were both walking across thin ice and had just realized the other person was out there too.

“The doctor said I might not make it through the night,” Vivian said at last, a strange calm flattening her voice. “That’s why I called James. I didn’t want to die alone.”

Callum’s heart slipped sideways in his chest.

“Then I’ll stay,” he said, the words leaving no room for argument. “No one should face this alone.”

The hours stretched and folded around them, bent by the beep of machines and the soft footsteps of nurses. He fetched her ice chips when her mouth went dry. Adjusted her blanket when she shivered. Put the TV on mute and let some late-night American sitcom flicker stupid, colorful light across the room just to break up the white.

He stayed when they hung the new bags of medication and connected them to her line, when she hissed at the first burning rush in her veins. He stayed when she dozed and when she woke with a small, startled sound, eyes wide until she saw him still there.

At some point, night gave way to a washed-out Seattle morning. Rain streaked the window, painting the sky in flat gray bands. Coffee smell seeped in from the hallway as the day shift arrived. The nurses’ voices grew brighter, more energetic.

And somehow, against the ugly odds Dr. Strand had quietly laid out, Vivian’s body didn’t fold. Her fever ebbed instead of climbing. Her heartbeat stayed steady. Her blood pressure, which he’d learned to read from the monitor through repetition, clung stubbornly to the safer side of the numbers.

By mid-morning, even Dr. Strand’s practiced poker face cracked into something like cautious relief.

“You’re responding better than we expected,” she told Vivian. “This doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods. But it does mean we’re not losing you today.”

When Callum finally stepped into the hallway to let the nurses reposition her and take yet another set of blood samples, he realized he’d been in that room for nearly eight hours. His body ached from the cheap chair, from the knot of tension that had wrapped itself around his spine.

He checked his phone. Three missed texts from Mrs. Bellamy, all variations of everything fine, Hazel still at Piper’s, don’t rush, and one photo of Hazel asleep on Piper’s couch, hair spread like a halo, limbs sprawled in that boneless way children had.

He texted back quickly, letting Mrs. Bellamy know he was heading home soon.

Before he left the floor, he stepped back into Vivian’s room one more time.

She looked exhausted, wrecked even, but alive. There was more color in her face than there had been at two in the morning. The storm in her eyes had quieted to something like wary gratitude.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said, voice rough but stronger. “Most people would have hung up. Or never gotten in the truck. Or left when they heard the D-word.”

“Leukemia?” he asked.

“Die,” she corrected softly. “People don’t like to hear that in real sentences. Messes with the American illusion that we can buy our way out of everything.”

He shrugged, suddenly awkward.

“Most people haven’t been where I’ve been,” he said, thinking of the night he’d sat in a different hospital, in a different city, watching a different monitor flatline.

“Take care of yourself, Vivian Marlo,” he added. “And if your ex ever does show up, maybe make sure the nurse is ready with security.”

Her mouth curved, the barest hint of a smile.

“I asked for your number while you were in the hall,” she said. “Dr. Strand is more dangerous than she looks.”

His phone buzzed. Unknown number. When he glanced down, her name appeared where he’d added it without really thinking.

“Now I can call the right wrong number next time,” she said.

He left the hospital believing with complete certainty that this had been a one-night detour in his already-complicated life. A strange story he might one day tell Hazel in some gentler version, a footnote in a year full of scraped bills and overworked engines.

He had no idea how completely wrong he was.

Three days later, just as the winter sun was sliding down behind the Seattle skyline and he was lowering the hydraulic lift on a minivan with a bad transmission, a glossy black sedan rolled into the cracked parking lot of Merrick’s Motors.

It did not belong.

Everything about it was wrong for this place—the polished paint, the gleam of chrome, the quiet purr of the engine. It looked like something out of a luxury car commercial, the kind of thing that never turned onto their block unless it was lost.

Rusty, his oldest mechanic, let out a low whistle.

“Somebody’s GPS went real wrong,” he muttered.

A man in a suit stepped out of the sedan. The fabric probably cost more than Callum’s monthly rent. He had the posture of someone who spent a lot of time in boardrooms and a face that seemed carved into permanent polite disapproval.

“Mr. Callum Merrick?” the man asked, voice crisp, carrying easily across the lot.

Callum wiped his hands on a rag, suddenly conscious of the grease under his nails, the oil stain on his shirt he hadn’t noticed.

“That’s me,” he said. “If it’s about your car, I’ll tell you right now, I charge extra for anything that pretty.”

The man did not smile.

“Miss Marlo requests your presence at her residence tomorrow evening at seven,” he said, holding out a cream-colored envelope with a small embossed M on the flap. “The address is inside. She instructed me to tell you that this matter is very important.”

Important.

That word, coming from someone who lived in the world of billion-dollar telecom deals and New York financial news segments, meant something different than it did in his world of rent deadlines and overdue electric bills.

His first instinct was to shut it down.

“I don’t think—”

“Miss Marlo asked me to emphasize,” the man added smoothly, “that she would not extend this invitation lightly.”

Then he turned, got back into the car, and drove away, leaving only the faint smell of expensive exhaust and a stunned silence behind.

Rusty sidled closer, eyes on the retreating sedan.

“Was that who I think it was about?” he asked. “That rich girl from the hospital? The one the news is always talking about when the market dips?”

Callum turned the envelope over in his hands, feeling the paper—thick, heavy, the kind you only saw in movies or law offices.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he lied.

For the next twenty-four hours, he was useless.

He miscounted inventory. He put the wrong label on a parts order. He poured creamer into an empty coffee cup and then forgot the coffee. Every time he tried to focus on a carburetor or a torque wrench, his mind wandered back to a hospital room and a woman whose last name could be seen from freeway billboards across the state.

What did she want from him? Gratitude? Closure? Some sort of legal document saying he wouldn’t talk to the press about that night?

Hazel, with the ruthless honesty of a child raised on American cartoons and YouTube, noticed his distraction at breakfast the next morning.

“Dad,” she said, frowning over her cereal. “You just poured orange juice into your coffee and put my cereal in my lunchbox.”

He looked down. Sure enough, her Cheerios sat neatly in a plastic container beside her sandwich, while his mug swirled with a horrific mixture of coffee and orange juice.

“Right,” he muttered. “That’s… new.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked, head tilted, brown eyes sharp in a way that always made him think of her mother.

“Nothing,” he lied again, far less smoothly than the man in the suit. “Just tired.”

It wasn’t until he was alone in the truck that evening, driving up a hill into a world that might as well have had its own zip code, that he admitted to himself why his stomach had been in knots.

He was curious. And he was worried.

The Marlo estate was exactly the kind of place regular people saw only in drone shots on national TV whenever cable news did a segment on the ultra-wealthy. The driveway wound forever through manicured grounds, past trees lit with subtle ground lights, past a fountain that probably cost more than his building.

The house itself rose at the top like something from a glossy magazine spread—white stone, huge windows, iron balconies. Somewhere an American flag fluttered discreetly, the kind of tasteful patriotic touch that reassured investors and board members that yes, their empire was firmly rooted in the land of opportunity.

He parked his truck near the side, where it would offend fewer eyes, and rang the bell, half expecting an alarm to go off just from the sight of his boots on their front steps.

A housekeeper with a professional smile led him through polished marble halls, past art that he was pretty sure belonged in a museum, not in someone’s living room.

Vivian was waiting in a sunlit sitting room, curled up on a white sofa that probably cost as much as his truck. She looked different out of the hospital—color back in her cheeks, makeup carefully applied to hide the lingering hollows, hair styled to disguise its thinning. She wore simple clothes, by her standards: a soft cashmere sweater, tailored jeans, bare feet tucked under her.

When she saw him, she smiled. Not the brittle, public smile he’d seen on the news, but something smaller and less controlled, something that reached her eyes.

“Callum Merrick,” she said. “You actually came.”

“You said it was important,” he replied, choosing a chair across from her because sitting next to her on that sofa felt too intimate for a man who still had motor oil permanently stained into his fingerprints. “And you sent a guy who looks like he eats important for breakfast.”

That pulled a quick laugh out of her, then she sobered.

“I have a proposal for you,” she said. “And before we start, yes, I know how ironic that sounds coming from a woman who’s been on the cover of Fortune twice.”

He spread his hands.

“Go on,” he said. “Worst case, I say no and go home to my glamorous life of frozen pizza and superhero movies.”

She inhaled, as if bracing to jump into deep water.

“You know my situation,” she began. “The leukemia. The treatment. The odds. What you don’t know is what’s happening inside my company while I’m here juggling chemo schedules and trying not to puke on my own board reports.”

She told him about the men in suits waiting like vultures around the Marlo Communications board table. About Donovan Westfield, her father’s long-time right-hand man, who had assumed that when Edmund Marlo died, the empire would be his by default. About the seething resentment that had followed when Edmund had left control of the company to his thirty-year-old daughter instead.

“They think I’m weak now,” she said, her eyes flashing in a way that made it very clear the chemo hadn’t touched her spine. “They think they can wait me out. Use my illness as an excuse to push me off the track and take everything my father built. I can’t let that happen, Callum. I won’t.”

He believed her.

“What does that have to do with me?” he asked, though in some small, unnerving corner of his mind, he already knew.

“I need to prove something to them,” she said. “That I’m still capable, still sane, still stable. That my life isn’t falling apart. That I have… support.”

The word tasted strange in her mouth, like she wasn’t used to saying it.

She leaned forward, elbows resting on her knees, her gaze locked on his.

“I want to hire you,” she said quietly. “To be my partner.”

His brain misfired.

“I fix transmissions,” he said flatly. “I don’t know anything about telecom. Or billionaires. Or whatever you’re asking.”

“I don’t need another executive,” she said. “I have too many of those already, and half of them would sell me for stock options. I need someone who has nothing to gain from my company. Someone who showed up for me when there was no contract on the table. Someone the board and the media can look at and say, ‘She’s not alone. She’s not losing it. She has her life together enough to have a relationship.’”

He stared at her.

“You want to hire me as a fake boyfriend,” he said.

She didn’t flinch.

“Yes,” she said simply. “Publicly, you would be my partner. You’d accompany me to treatments when I need someone there. You’d stand beside me at board meetings. At charity events. In photos. You’d show the world I am not an isolated, unstable heiress with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.”

He let out a short, stunned laugh.

“Vivian, I’m a mechanic,” he said. “I live in a walk-up in South Seattle. I drive a Ford with more rust than paint. I have oil under my nails that has probably outlived three presidents. I don’t belong in your world.”

“That’s exactly why you work,” she snapped, then softened. “You have no ties to my industry. No incentive to manipulate my position. You don’t care about stock prices, or quarterly reports, or East Coast hedge funds. You came to that hospital because I was scared, not because of my last name. That’s… rare.”

Her eyes searched his face, like she was trying to convince not just him, but herself.

“I will compensate you,” she added. “Fairly.”

“How fairly?” he asked warily.

She held his gaze.

“One million dollars,” she said. “For six months.”

His brain went blank.

For a second he thought he’d misheard her, that maybe the chemo had scrambled her words and she’d meant a hundred or ten thousand, some number that still belonged within the realm of normal, if slightly insane.

“One million,” she repeated. “U.S. dollars. Taxed, of course. Held in escrow. Terms spelled out clearly by my lawyers. Enough to set your daughter up for the future. Enough to get you out of whatever corner of the American working class you’re currently stuck in. Enough to change everything.”

His heart kicked hard against his ribs.

One million dollars.

Money that could move them out of their building with its temperamental heat and constant hallway noise into a neighborhood where Hazel could ride her bike without him hovering. Money that could pay for college without student loans. Money that could put aside the permanent, gnawing fear that one medical bill or one broken bone would send them into a spiral they couldn’t climb out of.

Money that, in this country, was the difference between treading water and finally getting onto stable ground.

“And all I have to do,” he said slowly, “is pretend to be in love with you.”

Her mouth twisted.

“All you have to do is stand beside me while I fight to stay alive,” she said. “Smile for some cameras. Sit in some meetings. Hold my hand when they hang that poison in the IV. Drive me home when I’m too wiped to walk. Tell the world that no, I am not losing my mind, I am in a committed relationship and still making decisions like a functioning adult.”

He looked away, because looking at her made it harder to think and easier to imagine that million.

“This is insane,” he said.

“I know,” she replied. “But my life stopped making sense the day they said ‘acute myeloid leukemia.’”

He left the Marlo estate without giving an answer.

The questions followed him like shadows all the way back to his neighborhood, down streets with cracked sidewalks and faded paint, past corner stores with neon lottery signs advertising American dreams most people never reached.

He drove to the cemetery instead of going straight home.

The graveyard sat on a hill with a view of the city, the skyline pricking up against the horizon, the lights flickering on as dusk pulled its blanket over the streets. Rosalind’s headstone wasn’t fancy. Simple gray stone. Her name. Her dates. A tiny etching of a classic car he’d insisted on adding because she’d loved the way he talked about engines.

He stood with his hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets, wind biting his cheeks.

“Ross,” he said quietly, feeling half-stupid and half-desperate, “what would you tell me to do?”

He imagined her answer. Practical. Honest. He could hear her voice in his head, the way she’d used to talk about money and choices and the strange American myth that everyone had the same shot if they just worked hard enough.

He thought about the first months after she died, when every decision had felt like walking a tightrope over a canyon. When he’d had to choose between paying the electric bill and letting Hazel join the after-school robotics club she loved. When a flat tire had sent him into a mad scramble to borrow cash before the landlord noticed the late rent.

One million dollars.

It hummed in the air between the headstone and his chest, loud and tempting.

But there was another question thread through it, sharp as barbed wire.

What would he be teaching Hazel?

That lying was acceptable if the paycheck was big enough? That integrity was a luxury for people who could afford it? That love was just another thing on the American marketplace, negotiable if the contract terms were good?

He stayed until his fingers went numb and the city lights blurred.

The next morning, he walked into their tiny kitchen to find Hazel carefully stitching up a tear in her worn backpack. Her tongue stuck out a little in concentration, needle moving through fabric with stubborn determination.

The sight hit him like a punch.

She was ten years old and already learning to mend instead of replace. To accept limitations as normal. To quietly fix things because asking for new wasn’t always an option.

He watched her for a moment, the million dollars sitting heavy behind his ribs.

She glanced up and grinned, gap-toothed, looking so much like her mother it made his throat close.

“Morning, Dad,” she said. “This bag’s gonna make it to middle school if it kills me.”

Something inside him settled.

He knew his answer.

He waited until that evening, when they were at their usual pizza place, the one with the cracked vinyl booths and the American football game always playing on some TV in the corner, before he told her.

He didn’t mention the amount. He didn’t say “fake boyfriend.” He simply explained that Miss Marlo, the lady from the hospital, was very sick and very important in a big company that kept lots of people’s phones talking. That she needed help going to treatments, and to meetings. That he’d been asked to work for her for six months, closely, to support her.

“So you’re like her nurse?” Hazel asked, a slice of pepperoni paused halfway to her mouth.

“Not exactly,” he said. “More like… a friend who helps her. I’ll drive her to appointments, stay with her when she’s getting medicine, go to boring business things so she’s not alone. And because we’ll be seen together a lot, people might think I’m dating her.”

Hazel’s eyebrows shot up.

“Are you?” she demanded. “Dating her? Is she going to be my new mom?”

He reached across the table and squeezed her small hand.

“No, sweetheart,” he said softly. “Nothing like that. She’s just someone who needs help. And I’m in a position to help.”

He explained, in the simplest terms he could, that the job paid very well. That it could help them move to a safer place. Maybe start a savings account for college. Maybe finally take that trip to Disney World she’d been begging for since she was seven.

Hazel watched him with that measuring look he’d come to dread and respect, the one that made it very hard to lie.

“But if you pretend to date her,” she said slowly, “isn’t that lying?”

The question sliced right through all the justifications he’d rehearsed.

“Yes,” he said, because he could not ask his daughter to hold onto principles he was secretly tossing aside. “In a way. It is. But sometimes life gets… complicated. There’s a difference between a lie that hurts someone and a lie that helps someone who’s really in trouble.”

She thought about that, brow furrowing.

“Like when I told Mrs. Bellamy I liked the sweater she gave me for Christmas even though it was itchy and smelled like her cat?” she asked.

He burst out laughing, tension shattering just enough to let in some air.

“Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”

Hazel nodded, solemn again. Then her face lit up.

“So if we move,” she said, words tumbling over each other, “can I have a room with a window seat? And can we paint it blue? And can we get a dog? You always said we couldn’t because the apartment’s too small and the landlord hates animals.”

He ruffled her hair, a strange mix of hope and guilt swirling in his chest.

“One step at a time, kiddo,” he said. “Let me start this job first.”

That night, after she’d fallen asleep with her sketchbook open on her chest, he stepped into the hallway and dialed Vivian’s number.

She answered on the second ring.

“I’ll do it,” he said, the words feeling heavy and irrevocable once they were out. “But I have conditions.”

“Name them,” she said immediately, not even pretending to play hardball.

“Hazel is always my first priority,” he said. “If she needs me, I go. No debate. And I won’t lie to her about any of this. She knows I’ll be working for you. She knows people might think we’re… together.”

There was a pause. When she spoke again, he could hear relief under the controlled tone.

“Agreed,” she said. “When can you start?”

“I need to talk to the shop,” he said. “Find someone to manage things while I’m gone. Two weeks.”

“One,” she countered. Not a question. Not a request. More like a gentle command. “My next treatment cycle starts Monday. I want you there. I’ll cover any losses your shop takes while you’re away.”

He exhaled.

“Fine,” he said.

And just like that, in the space of a single American phone call, the man who had planned to live and die under the hood of someone’s car stepped into a world of press releases and boardroom wars and photo flashes.

The next week was a blur.

He pulled Rusty aside and explained, as much as he could without breaching the terms of the contract he’d just signed with a roomful of very serious lawyers in a downtown office tower. He said he’d been invited by a big company to consult on fleet maintenance, a half-truth that sounded impressive enough to still his friend’s questions.

Rusty stared, then grinned like a kid.

“That’s huge, boss,” he said. “Go make some rich people pay for your expertise. I’ll take care of the shop.”

The conversation with Hazel had been the hardest, but she adjusted faster than any adult would have. Kids were like that. Flexible. Resilient. Terrifyingly willing to trust that the grown-ups knew what they were doing.

The first Monday he showed up at the Marlo estate as an employee, he barely recognized himself.

The clothes Vivian’s assistant had sent over felt like they belonged to someone else: dark jeans that fit perfectly, a cashmere sweater that was softer than anything he’d ever owned, a jacket that managed to be casual and polished at the same time. A stylist had even attacked his hair, trimming and taming it into something that didn’t scream I cut this myself in my bathroom mirror.

He still felt like a fraud.

Vivian was waiting in the foyer, one hand braced lightly on the edge of a console table, as if bracing herself from the inside. She wore black trousers, a cream blouse, and a silk scarf wrapped elegantly around her head, hiding the thinning hair without disguising the reality.

“Ready to be my eye candy?” she joked, though the tension in her shoulders told a different story.

He offered her his hand with exaggerated gallantry.

“Just point me where you want the cameras to flash,” he said.

The day’s schedule was brutal even by healthy-person standards. Chemo at ten in the morning. Board meeting at two. Each event alone would have knocked most people flat. The fact that she insisted on stacking them said a lot about both her stubbornness and the stakes.

Her private cancer center was nothing like Harborview.

This place looked like an upscale spa, designed for wealthy Americans who preferred their suffering wrapped in leather and soft lighting. Recliners instead of hospital beds. Art on the walls. Fresh flowers in vases. But the IV stands were the same, the bags of drugs the same dull color, the smell of antiseptic unchanged.

“You don’t have to stay in the room,” Vivian said as a nurse prepped the line in her hand. “You can wait outside. The staff all know who I am. They’ll fuss over me for you.”

“I’m not here just for show,” he said, pulling a chair up beside hers. “Tell me about your company. What does Marlo Communications actually do, besides drop calls at the worst possible moment?”

For three hours, as poison dripped into her blood, she talked.

She told him about fiber lines and wireless towers, about mergers and acquisitions, about the time the FCC had nearly fined them for some obscure regulation. She talked about her father’s vision of connecting rural American towns that the big East Coast carriers had ignored, about the way he’d insisted their headquarters stay in Seattle instead of fleeing to some tax friendlier state.

He listened, asked questions, cracked small jokes whenever her eyes went too flat.

When the infusion ended, she was pallid and shaky, but she still insisted on walking to the car under her own power. He hovered close, one hand ready.

As soon as they stepped out of the building, the air erupted in flashes.

Paparazzi.

He saw them an instant before they saw him—a cluster of photographers and gossip bloggers pressed against the edge of the parking lot, long lenses trained on the doors. Someone shouted her name, then another voice called out his.

The plan, he realized, had been bigger than just board optics.

Vivian straightened, shoulders squaring as if she’d just stepped onto a stage.

She slipped her arm through his, leaned into him just enough to make the photo, and walked slowly toward the car. The cameras went berserk. Questions flew through the air, half-formed, all sharp.

“Vivian, who is he?”

“Is this your new boyfriend?”

“Are you in love?”

“Is this your mystery man?”

The nurse who had followed them scowled, tried to wave the photographers back. It was useless. They got their shots.

The next day, every American gossip site and business blog carried the photos.

Billionaire heiress battles cancer with mystery man at her side.

Marlo princess finds love in the middle of chemo.

Who is the blue-collar hero holding Vivian’s hand?

The tabloid headlines were ridiculous, breathless, exactly the kind of thing that got shared and commented and clicked.

When he arrived at the estate the next morning, Vivian was curled up on the sofa, tablet in hand, scrolling through a mix of financial news, tech blogs, and digital tabloids. On the TV behind her, a cable talk show host was already speculating about her love life.

“So,” she said dryly as he walked in, “it worked.”

He caught a glimpse of the headlines over her shoulder, the photo of him helping her into the car blowing up on some national morning show, the hosts debating whether this love story was “exactly what America needs right now.”

“That’s all you care about?” he asked before he could stop himself. “The media hit?”

She looked up sharply.

“At this moment?” she said. “Yes. I have a board meeting in two hours. Those photos just strengthened my position. They can’t paint me as a weak, isolated, unstable woman if there’s a strong, devoted man standing next to me.”

“I’m not devoted,” he snapped, stung in some place he hadn’t known was vulnerable. “I’m being paid.”

For a second, something raw flashed in her eyes—hurt, or anger, or maybe just exhaustion. Then she shuttered it.

“Of course,” she said coolly. “I didn’t mean otherwise. Forgive me. I’ve been up since five. I need to prepare for the meeting. Sienna will show you to the library. There’s a suit laid out for you. The board prefers their props well-dressed.”

He almost apologized. Almost. But the bitter taste in his mouth was stronger.

Sienna Doyle, her personal assistant, was waiting in the hallway. She was in her late twenties, with sharp eyes and a tablet glued to her hand. She led him to a wood-paneled room lined with bookshelves and closed the door.

He stared at the suits hanging on the rack by the window, each one tailored to his measurements, each worth more than he’d ever spent on clothes in his life.

“Can I ask you something?” he said, as Sienna turned to go.

She paused.

“How long have you worked for her?” he asked.

“Five years,” Sienna said. “I started as an intern at Marlo Communications during college. Miss Marlo selected me for her personal team after I graduated.”

“So you know her,” he said. “Really know her.”

“Better than most,” Sienna said carefully.

He hesitated, then asked the question that had been nagging at him ever since he’d walked into that boardroom inside Harborview.

“Tell me about Donovan Westfield.”

Sienna’s face shifted, the polite neutral smoothing over something more complicated.

“Westfield was Edmund Marlo’s right hand for almost thirty years,” she said. “Everyone assumed he’d take over the company when Mr. Marlo died. Then the will named Vivian instead. He’s never forgiven her for that.”

“And now?” Callum asked.

“Now he’s using her illness as leverage,” Sienna said flatly. “Arguing she’s too emotional, too fragile to lead. That the company needs someone… sturdier. He’s been quietly courting the more conservative board members for months.”

She checked her watch.

“The car leaves for Marlo Tech Center in forty-five minutes,” she said. “Try on the navy suit first. It photographs well.”

By the time he stepped into the elevator that would take them up to the top floor of Marlo Tech Center, Seattle’s gleaming glass-and-steel headquarters, he looked like someone he didn’t recognize.

The suit fit like it had grown on him. The shoes were sleek and unfamiliar. His hair stayed where the stylist had persuaded it to go. Even his hands looked different without the embedded oil stains, though he knew if you looked close enough, you’d still see the faint ghosts of grease in the lines.

Vivian, in a fitted black blazer and subtle jewelry, walked beside him like she’d been born in hallways like this. No trace of the woman panting through chemo yesterday. She moved like a CEO, like an American business story the networks liked to put on when they needed a shining example of success.

The boardroom was large, its long table polished to a mirror shine. Men in expensive suits sat around it, their watches gleaming in the overhead light, faces composed in the way of men who had spent decades pretending to be bored while deciding the fate of thousands of jobs.

Callum felt every eye on him as he took the seat to Vivian’s right.

“As you can see,” Vivian began, her voice smooth, confident, the slightest edge of steel beneath, “my personal life is stable. My treatment is progressing. My vision for Marlo Communications is unchanged. Any attempts to question my capacity to lead will be recognized for what they are: opportunistic power plays.”

A few of the older men shifted, their expressions tightening.

One man in particular, silver hair combed perfectly back, eyes as cold and precise as a scalpel, folded his hands and leaned forward.

“And your companion?” he asked, gaze sliding to Callum like it was picking up something unpleasant on the sole of his shoe. “Mister… Merrick, was it? What exactly is your role in all this?”

Before Vivian could answer, something in Callum rebelled against the tone. Against being looked at like a pawn someone had dragged onto the board.

“I’m here to support Vivian,” he said, meeting Donovan Westfield’s gaze without flinching. “In whatever way she needs.”

Westfield’s lip curled almost imperceptibly.

“Some would call that love,” he said softly.

“Others would call it basic human decency,” Callum replied. “Either way, I’m not going anywhere.”

The silence that followed was thick enough to cut. Under the table, Vivian’s hand found his and squeezed once, hard. He didn’t know if it was gratitude or warning. He squeezed back anyway.

When the meeting ended, when the men in suits filed out to go make their own phone calls to other powerful men in other cities, when the door finally shut, the tension in Vivian’s shoulders loosened by a millimeter.

“That was unexpected,” she said as they walked toward the parking garage, her heels clicking on the tile. “And reckless. And… thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “I just don’t like bullies.”

She gave him a sidelong look, something unreadable in her eyes.

“Careful, Callum,” she said quietly. “Around here, the bullies don’t just take your lunch money. They take everything they can reach.”

He believed her.

He just had no idea yet how far someone like Donovan Westfield would go—or how much it would cost, in dollars and in damage, for an ordinary mechanic and a dying billionaire to stand their ground in a country where everything, including stories about love and illness and loyalty, could be weaponized for profit.