2

Clara The number the doctor wrote on that slip of paper didn't feel real. I stared at it in the hallway outside the ICU until the digits blurred, until a nurse gently asked if I needed to sit down. Four million. That was what it would take to save him. I had exactly eleven thousand dollars in my personal account, money I'd been saving for two years without telling my parents, tucked away in case Ethan and I ever needed to run far enough that they couldn't reach us. It felt like nothing now. A joke. A drop against an ocean. I called everyone I could think of. College friends whose families had money but not that kind of money. A cousin who owed me a favor and apologized before I'd even finished asking. I tried the bank, and the loan officer looked at me with polite pity and explained, as gently as he could, that no institution would extend that kind of credit to a twenty-four-year-old with no assets in her own name. By morning I hadn't slept, hadn't eaten, hadn't left the plastic chair outside Ethan's room except to make more calls that all ended the same way. Through the little window in his door I could see him, tubes and wires holding him together, his chest rising and falling too slowly. That was how my parents found me. I heard my mother's heels against the hospital floor before I saw her, that same brisk, unhurried rhythm she used everywhere, boardrooms and charity galas and now, apparently, intensive care wards. My father was a step behind her, his coat still buttoned, like he intended this to be a short visit. "Clara." My mother's voice had none of the coldness from two nights ago. If anything, she sounded almost gentle, which frightened me more than her anger ever had. "You look terrible." "He's dying." My voice cracked on the word. "The surgery costs more than I can raise in a lifetime. I need help. I know I said things, I know I walked out, but I'm asking you. Please." My father glanced through the little window at Ethan, and something crossed his face, gone too fast for me to name it. Then he looked back at me, and he was all business again. "We can help," he said. "There are conditions." I should have known. I should have felt the trap closing before it did. But I was too tired, too raw, too desperate to hear anything except the word help. "Anything." My mother reached into her bag and withdrew a folder, sliding it toward me like she'd had it prepared, like she'd known exactly how this conversation would go before she ever walked through the door. Inside was a name I recognized from magazine covers and business headlines. Sebastian Ashford. Heir to the Ashford empire, one of the wealthiest, most photographed bachelors in the country. "Marry him," my mother said. "Within three days. The Ashfords have already agreed, on the condition it happens quickly and quietly. Do this, and your father will personally cover every cent of that boy's treatment. The surgery, the recovery, whatever specialists he needs. He'll have the best care money can buy." "And if I refuse?" My father's expression didn't change. "Then I'm afraid our family has no further obligation to fund the medical care of a stranger." "He's not a stranger, he's the man I love, and you know that, you've always known that." "Which is precisely why this is generous," my mother said. "We are giving you a way to save him. Most families in our position wouldn't bother." I looked through the window again, at the slow rise and fall of Ethan's chest, at the monitors tracking a heartbeat that could stop at any moment without four million dollars neither of us had. "I need time to think." "You have until tomorrow morning," my father said, already turning to leave, already finished with me. "The offer expires the moment he does, Clara. Choose quickly." They left the way they'd arrived, unhurried, certain of the outcome, and I understood then that this had never really been an offer. It was a verdict, dressed up to look like a choice. I didn't leave the hospital that night. I pulled the plastic chair as close to Ethan's bed as the nurses would allow and I sat there for hours, watching the machines breathe for him in ways his own body no longer could without help. I held his hand, careful of the IV taped to the back of it, and I memorized the shape of his knuckles, the calluses from years of work he was proud of, the faint ring of pale skin on his finger where he never wore anything except, occasionally, the matching promise band he kept in his glove compartment for luck. "You told me once you'd give me a real ring someday," I whispered. "You said you wanted to earn it. I always thought that was silly, that I didn't care how it came to me, as long as it came from you." His face didn't change. The ventilator hissed and clicked in a rhythm that had nothing to do with him anymore. "I still don't care about rings, Ethan. I never did. I only ever cared about you having a future to put one in." I pressed my forehead against his hand and let myself cry the way I hadn't allowed myself to in front of my parents, ugly and silent and endless, until the front of my shirt was damp and my throat ached from holding back sound. "I'm going to do something," I said finally, my voice barely more than breath. "And I need you to understand, wherever you are right now, that I'm not doing it because I stopped loving you. I'm doing it because I can't watch you die when I have a way to stop it. Even if that way costs me everything else." I thought of the ring on my hand, the one he'd made himself, uneven and small and worth more to me than every diamond in my mother's collection. "I'm sorry," I whispered. "For what I'm about to do. I'm so sorry, Ethan. Please forgive me. Please survive long enough to hate me for it." By the time the sun came up, gray and thin through the hospital blinds, I had made my decision. I found my parents waiting in the family lounge down the hall, as if they'd known all along I would come. My mother slid the marriage contract across the table without a word. My hand was steady when I picked up the pen. It was the only steady thing left in me. I signed my name, and somewhere down the hall, a machine kept Ethan's heart beating for a future I had just traded away to buy him.