“No,” he said, reaching out to grasp my wrist with surprising pressure. “The nurses will just bring more of those useless pills. Just stay here, dearest.”
His canvas overnight bag sat on the chair by the window, the zipper half-undone. A long white slip of paper with a blue airline logo was sticking out from behind his spare shaving kit.
I stepped toward the chair, pretending to clear away his empty dinner tray so I could get closer to the bag. The printed paper was an airline ticket, the black ink fresh on the boarding pass.
The destination was San Jose, departing on November sixteenth, the day after my inheritance was scheduled to clear. But the name printed under the flight number was not Benjamin Cole.
“What are you looking at, dearest?” Ben asked, his voice suddenly loud in the quiet room.
“Just checking if you need clean socks,” I said, my thumb blocking the name as I pushed the ticket back down into the side pocket.
“Leave the bag alone,” he said, his hand dropping back to the mattress as he let out a long sigh. “The doctor said I might go home tomorrow, and I want everything packed exactly the way it is.”
I sat back down in the vinyl chair, my hands locked in my lap. I had only caught the first three letters of the name on the ticket, and they did not belong to my husband.
The hospital corridor was quiet when I slipped down the hall toward the administrative wing at nine o’clock. Nurse Evelyn was waiting in the small alcove outside Dr. Paulson’s locked office, constantly adjusting her silver ID badge as she looked around the corner.
“We only have a few minutes before the night supervisor makes her rounds,” Evelyn said, her voice a quick whisper.
“I saw the ticket in his bag,” I said. “He is leaving the day after the funds clear.”
Evelyn closed her hand over her badge to stop it from swinging. “Dr. Paulson ordered me to bypass the digital entry system three weeks ago.”
“Why would he do that?” I asked.
“He told me to enter his own handwritten clinical notes instead of the actual laboratory reports from the pathology department,” she said.
“That is a criminal offense,” I said, looking back toward the main nurses’ station.
“Dr. Paulson owes Ben’s construction firm sixty thousand dollars for the addition they built on his home last summer,” Evelyn said.
She reached into her deep pocket, her fingers brushing past her keys with a faint metallic clink. She pulled out a folded white paper that had been creased multiple times.
“He told me he would have my license revoked if I questioned the entries,” Evelyn said, her voice shaking slightly.
She placed the folded sheet into my hand, her eyes locked on mine.
“But I kept the paper copies,” Evelyn said.
I unfolded the sheet under the dim fluorescent light of the alcove, my eyes scanning the official letterhead of St. Jude Hospital.
Nurse Evelyn handed Clara a copy of the original, unaltered laboratory report.
