Aurora POV:
A dozen men in black suits came through my emergency department like a raid.
Darrel's private security moved as a unit. They yanked the privacy curtains shut across every glass panel, cutting off the waiting room.
One of them, a slab of a man with a shaved head, stepped into my path.
"The chart," he said. "Mr. Stark's instruction. Every page, every copy, and the duplicate book. Then your phone."
"No."
"He wants it in his hand before that woman leaves this building." He put out his palm, flat, the way you do at a stray dog. "Don't make this complicated, ma'am."
And there it was.
Not the woman. Not the bleeding. The paper.
Six hours ago my husband walked in here with his brother's fiancée in his arms and a publicist on speed dial, and the very first thing he did once she was stable was send a man to take the record away from me.
Because Darrel Stark has never in his life been afraid of a story. Stories get killed. He has three people on payroll whose entire job is killing stories, and by morning every outlet in this city would have been told that Ms. Silva slipped on ice outside the arena.
Paper is different.
Paper is a physician's findings, and a time stamp, and a question asked in front of four medical professionals, and his own answer written down underneath it.
He is not burying a rumor. He is burying a document.
And a man who has spent six hours at a hospital and thinks about the document first is not a man in love. He is a man who has been told, by somebody, that a document is the dangerous thing.
Somebody in that family got to him already.
Which meant they were closer to understanding what I was holding than he was.
I stepped back.
He scowled and unclipped the baton off his belt. Behind the counter, Claire, one of our younger nurses, made a small noise and ducked out of sight.
I did not blink.
"Federal law," I said. "Touching a patient's medical record is a federal offense. And the record is already in the system. You can take every piece of paper on this floor and it will still be there Thursday morning. Try it."
The trauma doors opened. Darrel came out, waved the man off, and came at me himself. Behind him the hospital director was sprinting down the corridor in a suit, sweating through the collar.
He bowed his head to Darrel before he turned on me.
"Give him the chart, Aurora. Now."
I let my fingers open. The clipboard slid out of my hands, and I watched the director carry it to Darrel like a retriever.
Take it. It's the top sheet. Name, vitals, arrival time. It says almost nothing.
The carbon copy was folded in the pocket over my hip, and it had the attending's findings, the time stamp, and my husband's signature on it.
He watched the director hand it over and his shoulders came down half an inch.
That is how little he knows. He thinks it's over because he's holding cardboard.
Darrel pulled a leather checkbook and a gold pen out of his jacket and wrote a number fast enough to scratch the paper. He slammed it down on the counter.
"One hundred thousand dollars," he said. "Keep your mouth shut."
The check slid off the laminate and drifted to the floor.
I looked down at it and something pulled at the corner of my mouth that was not a smile.
The doors opened again. They wheeled Jayme out on a transport bed, pale, eyes fluttering. Her gaze went across the whole crowded hallway and landed on me, precisely, like she had been waiting for the angle.
She smirked. Weakly. Deliberately.
I looked at her the way I look at a bag of medical waste.
Darrel turned his back on me, leaned over the bed, and cupped her cheek with one enormous hand, and his shoulders blocked my view entirely.
They pushed her toward the VIP exit and he walked beside her the whole way. At the door he threw one last warning glare over his shoulder at me.
Then he was gone. The Bentley pulled away, and the ER went quiet.
The director wiped his forehead and scurried off.
Claire popped up beside me with her eyes shining.
"Oh my god," she whispered. "Was that Captain Stark? She has to be his soulmate. They must have been going at it so hard to end up in here."
I bent down and picked the check up off the floor and crushed it into a ball.
Then I turned to Claire and lowered my voice into the flat, careful tone we use for bad news.
"I read his chart," I said.
Claire's mouth opened.
"Severe organic erectile dysfunction," I said. "It's documented. He can't perform. The injuries you saw came from illegal oversized mechanical devices, because that's the only way he can do it at all."
Her hands flew up over her mouth. The romance died in her face and disgust took its place. "Ew. Oh my god. Ew."
I patted her shoulder. "Patient confidentiality, Claire. Not a soul."
Claire could not keep a secret if you paid her rent. By morning, Darrel Stark's impotence would be the hottest thing in every break room in this building.
I went into the staff kitchen and fed the crumpled check into the shredder. It whirred and chewed it into confetti.
Then I stripped off my scrubs, put on my coat, and walked out through the corridor toward the parking garage.
Two techs were leaning against the wall by the elevators, talking with their heads together, and I heard it as I passed.
"—no, my cousin's on the transport crew, she said the Stark woman lost the baby—"
"Which Stark woman?"
"The reporter. The pretty one. And I heard the wife did something."
I stopped for half a second.
That is not what I said. That is not remotely what I said.
That is what a rumor does. You put a thing into a hospital and it comes back out with a different face on it, and this one had my name stitched into the side.
I could have gone back and corrected it.
I looked at the elevator, and I thought about a man in a trauma room saying yes into a chart, and I decided that I did not care.
I kept walking.
The doors slid shut. The freezing lake wind hit me on the street, and for the first time in seven years, I could breathe.
