My Boyfriend and Friends Stole My Heart Surgery Fund for Their Trip novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Declined
Vicky's card is declined at the hospital payment desk and she learns where her $48,888 went; she freezes everything, and then watches Bree toast her heart on video.
The payment kiosk at the cardiology wing beeped twice and printed the word DECLINED.
I tried the card again.
Behind me, a man with an oxygen tank cleared his throat.
"Try it once more, hon," said the woman at the desk. "Sometimes it needs a second."
It did not need a second.
I had nine thousand dollars to put down by five o'clock to hold my surgery date.
I had checked the balance on Monday, the night before Dillon left for his work trip.
It had said $48,888.
"Can you look it up on your end?" I asked the woman.
She turned her screen toward herself, typed, and her face changed.
"Ms. Merrow, the account shows a zero balance."
"That's wrong. It's my mother's house money. It's all I have for the operation."
"I'm sorry. There are three transfers out of it, all from Tuesday."
She slid a printout under the glass.
The first line said Seabright Villas, $31,400.
The second said an airline, $9,200.
The third was a transfer to a checking account ending in 4471, for $8,288.
I knew that ending.
It was Dillon's.
The man with the oxygen tank said, "Miss, are you okay?"
I said I was fine.
My heart was doing the fluttering thing it does.
The cardiologist called it a leaking valve.
My mother had called it nothing, because she never told anyone.
I held the edge of the desk until it stopped.
"Is there anything else on the file?" I asked.
The woman looked at her screen again.
"Only that Dr. Hartigan has already signed off on his own surgeon's fee. It's marked waived."
"I didn't ask him to do that."
"Nobody asked him to," she said. "It was in the system when I opened your chart."
I didn't have room for that yet.
I took the printout and walked out into the parking garage and sat in my car with the door open.
I called Dillon.
It rang six times and went to voicemail, with his warm voice saying, "Hey, you've reached Dillon. Leave me something nice and I'll call you right back."
My phone buzzed before I could hang up.
It was a text from Dillon.
"Hey babe, in a meeting, call you tonight. Don't stress about anything, okay? Your heart needs calm."
I read it twice.
Dillon sold cars.
He did not have meetings on a Saturday.
I opened the photo app on my phone out of habit, and the shared album Bree had made for all of us was sitting at the top with a new notification.
Bree was my best friend.
She had held my hand at my mother's funeral.
She had sat next to me at the first appointment where they said the word surgery.
The album was called "Keys Trip!!!"
I pressed it.
The first picture was a white house on stilts over green water.
The second was Dillon in sunglasses, holding a cocktail with a paper umbrella.
The third was Toby with his arm around Bree, and all three of them were squinting into the sun.
The fourth was a picture I had taken myself last August, of a beagle on a beach towel with a little flower collar around his neck.
Biscuit was my dog.
I had found him when he was a puppy, under the loading dock behind my clinic, with a notch bitten out of his left ear.
I had not seen him since Tuesday morning.
Dillon had said he was taking him to the groomer.
Someone had lifted it from my own account and typed under it: "Our little family!"
There was a video at the bottom of the album.
I pressed play with a thumb that wasn't steady.
The camera swung across a dining table covered in shrimp and a pitcher of something orange.
Dillon was at the head of it.
Toby was banging a fork on a glass.
Bree stood up with her phone in one hand and her drink in the other, and she was laughing.
"Okay, okay, everybody. A toast. To Vicky."
Everybody cheered.
"To Vicky's heart," Bree said. "It's been there for her this long. It'll hold."
Dillon laughed so hard he put his head on the table.
I watched it all the way to the end.
Then I sat still for a while in the garage with the printout on my knee.
I did not cry.
I looked at the number again, $48,888, and at the date I had to be in an operating room, nineteen days from now.
Nobody was coming to fix it.
So I stopped waiting for Dillon to explain.
I called the bank's fraud line.
I told the man who answered that I wanted every card and account frozen, mine and the shared ones.
I wanted it done before I hung up.
"Ma'am, if the transfers were authorized from your own device, that changes the process."
"It's my device," I said. "I didn't authorize anything."
"Then someone else had access to your phone."
I looked at the video, still frozen on Dillon laughing.
I remembered Monday night, when I had fallen asleep on the couch with my phone in my hand.
I remembered him taking it out of my fingers and putting a blanket on me.
"Yes," I said. "Somebody did."
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