5. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
The hospital smells like antiseptic and bad news. I’ve been in enough of them to know the difference between the waiting rooms where people get better and the ones where they don’t, and this one has the particular quality of fluorescent light that says brace yourself.
Danny is propped up in the bed when I walk in, gray around the edges but grinning like he’s at a party instead of hooked up to machines that beep every time his heart remembers to beat.
“You look terrible,” he says.
“You’re one to talk.”
“I’m allowed. I’m dying.” He says it the way he says everything, lightly, like it’s a joke we’re both in on, like death is just another inconvenience in a life that’s been full of them. “You’re supposed to be at your fancy new job. What happened, they fire you already?”
“Day off.”
“Liar. You don’t take days off. You don’t even take lunch breaks.” He shifts in the bed, wincing, and I’m at his side before I realize I’ve moved. “Relax, Nic. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.”
“I’m fine-adjacent. That’s basically the same thing.”
I want to argue with him. I want to shake him until he takes this seriously, until he stops making jokes about dying like it’s not the thing that wakes me up at three in the morning with my heart pounding and my hands shaking.
But the doctor is already in the doorway, chart in hand, and Danny’s face does something complicated - a flash of fear, quickly hidden - that tells me he’s not as cavalier as he pretends.
“Miss Clarke.” The doctor’s name is Sorenson, and she has the kind of tired eyes that come from giving too much bad news. “I was hoping we could talk.”
“So talk.”
She glances at Danny. He waves a hand. “She’s going to find out anyway. Might as well rip the Band-Aid off.”
Dr. Sorenson nods and flips open the chart, and I don’t need her to slow down. I don’t need her to translate the numbers and the terminology, because I spent two years learning this language before I had to stop, and it comes back now like a song I never forgot.
I read the monitor over her shoulder. I know which numbers matter and which ones are noise. I know the words she’s using - aggressive, window, protocol - and I know what they mean when you strip away the clinical distance.
“The treatment you mentioned,” I hear myself say. “The one that’s out of network.”
“It’s shown promising results in cases like your brother’s.” Dr. Sorenson’s voice is careful, measured. “There’s a specialist in Boston. The success rate is significantly higher than what we can offer here.”
“How much higher?”
“Sixty-three percent versus twenty-one.”
The numbers land in my chest like stones. Twenty-one percent. That’s what Danny has right now, with the treatment we can barely afford. That’s less than one in four. That’s the kind of number people use when they’re preparing you for loss.
“And the cost?” I already know. I’ve already looked it up. But I need to hear her say it, need to make it real.
Dr. Sorenson tells me.
The number hangs in the air between us, six figures long, more money than I’ve ever seen in my life, more money than I’ll make in twenty years of double shifts and scraped-together savings.
It’s the kind of number that exists in a different world than mine, a world where people worry about investments instead of rent, where a hospital bill doesn’t mean choosing between food and medicine.
“There are financing options,” Dr. Sorenson is saying. “Payment plans. We can work with you on-”
“I understand.” My voice comes out flat. Professional. The voice I learned in lecture halls before I had to leave them, before my parents died and my world collapsed and I became the kind of person who cleans her shoes in gas station bathrooms.
Danny is watching me from the bed. He knows that voice too.
“Nic-”
“I’ll figure it out.” I make myself smile. I’ve gotten very good at making myself smile. “I always do.”
The drive back to the house takes an hour, and I spend every minute of it doing math that doesn’t work.
I add up my salary, my savings, the money I’ve managed to put aside from years of extra shifts.
I subtract rent, utilities, the minimum payments on debts I’ll never pay off.
I multiply and divide and carry numbers from one column to the next, and no matter how I arrange them, the answer is always the same.
Not enough.
Not even close.
By the time I pull into the driveway - the driveway that’s longer than my old street, lined with hedges that cost more to maintain than my brother’s monthly medication - my hands are shaking on the wheel.
I park around back, where the staff cars go.
I sit there for a long moment, staring at the dashboard, trying to remember how to be a person.
Then I go inside and I do my job.
I help Olivia with her letters. I read her stories. I answer her endless questions about why the sky is blue and why fish have to live in water and why Rabbit only has one ear. I’m present. I’m engaged. I’m everything a good nanny should be.
And the number sits in my head like a tumor, growing larger every time I let myself think about it.
I make it through dinner. I make it through bath time. I make it through three bedtime stories and one extra, because Olivia asks and I can’t say no to her, not tonight, not when the weight of everything is pressing down on my chest like a hand.
I make it to the back staircase before I fall apart.
It’s the servants’ staircase - narrow, utilitarian, tucked away where the family never has to see it. I’ve used it a dozen times in the past week, slipping between floors without disturbing the gleaming marble of the main house. Tonight I make it halfway up before my legs give out.
I sit down on the step.
I put my fist in my mouth.
And I cry.
Not pretty tears. Not the kind you see in movies, where the heroine weeps decoratively and someone hands her a tissue.
This is ugly, animal grief, the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than your chest. My whole body shakes with it.
My breath comes in ragged gasps that I have to muffle against my hand, because the walls in this house are thin and I will not - I will not - let anyone hear me break.
Danny is dying.
Danny is dying and there’s a treatment that could save him and it costs more than I’ll ever have and I am sitting on a staircase in a billionaire’s house surrounded by more money than I’ve seen in my entire life and none of it belongs to me.
I don’t know how long I sit there. Long enough for the tears to slow. Long enough for my breathing to even out into something that’s almost normal. Long enough that I think I’ve got it together, that I can stand up and walk to my room and pretend I’m fine-
Someone sits down on the step beside me.
I flinch, jerking away, and then I see who it is and I freeze.
Callum Lippitt, in shirtsleeves, his tie loosened, sitting on a servants’ staircase in his own house like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t say anything. He just sits there, his elbows on his knees, his hands loosely clasped, looking at the wall across from us like it’s the most interesting wall he’s ever seen.
The silence stretches. I should say something. I should apologize, excuse myself, get up and leave before he sees any more of me than he already has. But I can’t move. I can’t speak. I can barely breathe.
“I heard you crying,” he says finally. His voice is quiet, pitched low, like he’s talking to a spooked animal. “From the hallway.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
“It’s nothing. It’s a bad day. Everyone has them.”
He turns his head. Looks at me. And there’s something in his face I don’t expect - not pity, not curiosity, but recognition. Like he knows exactly what bad days look like, like he’s lived through enough of them to stop pretending they don’t exist.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Nichole.”
“I can’t-” My voice cracks. I hate that it cracks. “I can’t talk about it. If I talk about it, I’ll start again, and I just - I can’t.”
He nods. He doesn’t push. He just sits there on the step beside me, close enough that I can feel the warmth of him, far enough that he’s not touching.
The minutes tick by. My breathing steadies. The tears dry on my face.
“How much?” he asks.
“What?”
“Your brother. The treatment.” He’s still not looking at me. “How much does it cost?”
The number sits on my tongue like poison. I don’t want to say it. Saying it makes it real. Saying it means admitting that I’ve done the math and the math doesn’t work.
“Don’t,” I say.
“How much, Nichole.”
And I tell him.
The number comes out flat, stripped of all the zeroes, because I can’t bring myself to say them all. But he hears it. I watch his face when he hears it, and he doesn’t flinch.
He doesn’t even blink.
To this man, the number that is killing my brother is a rounding error. He probably spends more than that on grounds maintenance in a year. He probably has watches that cost more. He probably-
“Get some sleep,” he says, and stands.
I look up at him. He’s silhouetted against the dim light from the hallway, his face unreadable, his hands in his pockets.
“That’s it?” I hear myself say. “That’s all you’re going to-”
But he’s gone before I can ask anything else. His footsteps fade down the corridor, around a corner, into silence.
I sit on the staircase for a long time after he leaves, trying to figure out what just happened.
A man who barely speaks sat down beside me while I cried and didn’t tell me to stop.
A man who keeps his distance from everyone asked me a question I didn’t want to answer and didn’t push when I told him the truth.
A man who has everything looked at me like he understood what it means to have nothing.