Chapter 12: Four Thousand

I sat up on the bed in my wedding dress.

"Thirty days," I said.

"Thirty days."

"Can you pay it?"

"I can find a hundred and forty million dollars in thirty days." "That isn't the problem."

"Then what is?"

"The board has to vote to take my money. Cornelia's board. She'll vote to sell the land to Harborline instead and call it saving the hospital."

"When's the vote?"

"Her lawyer filed it at five this morning. Two weeks from Monday, the board considers the closure of trauma services."

He'd read all of it already.

He'd probably read it standing in the hall outside my door while I slept.

"They'll say nobody needs us," I said. "That's how they always do it. They'll say the numbers are low."

"Are they?"

"We see four thousand trauma patients a year."

"Can you prove it?"

I swung my legs off the bed.

"Get me a truck," I said. "And find me my nurse."

Grandda got his pacemaker at ten that morning.

He woke up from the sedation and asked the cardiologist if he played cards.

By noon the kid had backed a borrowed van up to my parents' triple-decker and was carrying boxes out of the basement on his cane.

Thirty-one banker's boxes.

"What is all this?" he asked.

"Every trauma log I've signed for seven years."

"You kept them?"

"I photocopied every one at the end of every shift."

"Why?"

"Because a hospital lawyer once told me the records were the hospital's, not mine."

The kid looked at the boxes, and then at me, with a new kind of respect.

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