Chapter 12 - The Whispering Gallery
The marble floors of Metropolitan Memorial Hospital gleamed under the harsh fluorescent lights.
I walked through the pediatric wing with my hospital badge clipped to my scrub top, trying to ignore the stares.
Word traveled fast in Manhattan medical circles, especially when the disgraced heir of a pharmaceutical dynasty was demoted to an ordinary attending.
Nurses leaned over the nursing station, whispering behind raised clipboards as I passed.
"Is that really him?"
"I heard he gave up a fifty-million-dollar inheritance for the girl in pediatric surgery."
"Don't be naive, people like him always have an angle."
I tuned out the hum of gossip and pushed through the double doors into the neonatal intensive care unit.
Rowan was already there, leaning over an incubator with her brow furrowed in deep concentration.
She looked so composed, so fiercely capable, that no one looking at her would suspect she had been crying an hour earlier in our hallway.
"Vitals are stabilizing on the premature twin in bed four," she said without turning around, recognizing my footsteps.
"You're late for handover, Dr. Caldwell."
"I had a meeting with Margaret in the administrative wing," I replied, stepping up beside her and sanitizing my hands.
She glanced sideways at me, her eyes clouded with an unspoken anxiety.
"What did Chief Walsh say?"
"She assured me that our credentials are bulletproof and that hospital administration will not yield to external board pressure."
"External board pressure is just a polite word for your father, Sebastian."
She closed the incubator port gently and pulled off her latex gloves.
"He donated the entire north wing of this hospital ten years ago," she continued, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper.
"He owns half the trustees on the executive committee."
"He doesn't own Margaret Walsh, and he doesn't own me," I replied, standing firm.
Before Rowan could answer, the glass doors of the ward hissed open with a sharp mechanical wheeze.
A woman stepped into the sterile corridor, her high designer heels clicking with deliberate, menacing authority against the linoleum.
It was not my father.
It was Victoria Whitlow, dressed in a pristine ivory trench coat, an Hermès bag slung over her slender forearm.
My former fiancée looked around the neonatal ward with an expression of open disgust, as if the smell of antiseptic offended her very existence.
Rowan instinctively stepped back, her body stiffening as if she had been slapped.
"Victoria," I said, stepping into the middle of the hallway to block her view of the patient rooms.
"You are trespassing in a sterile intensive care unit."
"Am I?" Victoria purred, pulling a laminated visitor badge from her lapel.
"The Whitlow Foundation just funded three new pediatric ventilators this morning, Sebastian."
"Which makes me an honored benefactor of Metropolitan Memorial."
May you like
Her cold, calculating gaze slid right past my shoulder and locked onto Rowan with vicious satisfaction.
"So this is where the nanny spends her days when she isn't seducing other women’s fiancés."
