She Made It, Then Dumped Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Rhodies

Sonia's fans mob his father's hospital room and shake the bed until his heart stops. After the doctors restart it, her agent tells Wesley to take the money, and the bank freezes every account he has.

I took the stairs because the elevator was too slow.

Room 612 had a crowd in the doorway.

They were wearing white T-shirts with Sonia's face printed on the front.

Half of them were holding up phones.

"There he is," someone said. "That's the son."

I pushed through.

My father lay in the bed with his oxygen tube pulled sideways across his cheek.

A big man in a Rhodies cap had both hands on the bed rail.

He was shaking it.

"Where's your boy?" he shouted into my father's face. "Tell him to put her movies back!"

The monitor above them was screaming.

I grabbed the man's wrist.

"Let go of him."

"Make me," he said, and grinned at the nearest phone.

I did.

I twisted his arm off the rail and walked him backward into the wall.

A woman in the crowd screamed, "He's attacking a fan!"

"He's attacking my father," I said.

The big man swung at me.

He missed, and his elbow caught the bed instead.

It rolled hard into the cabinet, and my father's whole body jolted with it.

The line on the monitor went flat for one long second, and then it jumped.

"Code blue!" the nurse yelled from the hall.

Everyone with a phone kept filming.

Two orderlies dragged the big man out by the shoulders.

A doctor shoved me aside and bent over my father with the paddles.

I stood against the wall with my hands open at my sides.

Nobody in the room looked at me except the lenses.

"Clear," the doctor said.

My father's chest rose off the mattress.

The line steadied.

It stayed steady.

I let out a sound I didn't recognize as mine.

They wheeled him to the ICU with the oxygen mask on and a nurse walking beside him.

At the elevator, a police officer took the big man's statement.

The man was smiling.

"I was just visiting," he said. "He's the guy who hurt Sonia. Ask anybody."

"You put a sick man's heart on the floor," the officer said.

"He started it. His kid did."

I stood there and listened to a stranger decide I was guilty.

Behind me, a girl in a white T-shirt posted the whole thing with the caption: Karma for Wesley Thornton.

It already had eleven thousand likes.

A woman from hospital billing stopped me before I reached the end of the hall.

"Mr. Thornton, I'm sorry to do this now. The ICU needs a deposit of sixty thousand dollars by tonight."

"Put it on my card."

"Please do. We have to run it before six."

She said it kindly, and she meant it kindly, and she looked at her clipboard instead of my face.

The clip of me pinning a fan to the wall had already reached her phone.

I walked to the end of the hall where it was quiet.

Sonia's agent was waiting by the vending machines with his hands in his pockets.

"I came as soon as I heard," he said.

"Then you can tell her fans to stop."

"Wes, it's not that simple."

"My father almost died."

"I know. I'm sorry." He glanced up and down the hall. "Listen. I'll be straight with you, because we go back."

I waited.

"She's been picked up by somebody big. I can't say who. They have money and they have the press, and they want Jace to be the next face of the industry."

"And Sonia goes with him."

"Sonia goes where they tell her." He lowered his voice. "If you fight this, they'll bury Jace and you'll look like the man who buried a kid. Take the ten thousand. It's an exit. Use it."

Somebody big.

I almost laughed.

There wasn't a person in this business who could make a phone call I couldn't answer.

For six years I had kept my name off every deed, every contract and every credit.

Sonia had never known how many of her doors I had opened.

I had wanted her to believe she'd done it alone.

"Who is it?" I asked.

"I really can't."

"Then thanks for the advice."

I left him standing there.

My second phone was already ringing in my pocket.

My chief of staff didn't say hello.

"Mr. Thornton, there's a problem."

"Go ahead."

"A complaint came in an hour ago. Someone has told the authorities you've been laundering money through Northlight for years. They've sent notice to every bank we use."

"Laundering," I said. "I have never moved a dollar that wasn't on paper."

"I know, sir. They don't care yet."

"What does that mean for my accounts?"

"It means they've been frozen, sir. Your personal ones first. Then the operating account."

She stopped.

"Everything but your debit card, sir," she said. "Give them another hour and that goes too."

I looked through the glass at the ICU doors, where my father lay hooked up to a machine that cost four thousand dollars a day.

The only money I could still touch was Sonia's ten thousand.

It would not cover the sixty.

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