Chapter 3 - THE WING OF WHITE WALLS
Z
The second floor of the Mercer estate was divided into two distinct worlds. The west wing belonged to me—a sprawling expanse of dark mahogany, leather, and silence. The east wing, however, had been entirely transformed over the past eight months. It was no longer a home; it was a high-security, state-of-the-art pediatric intensive care unit disguised as a residential corridor.
I stood at the heavy glass double doors that separated the main house from the children’s wing. Prescott stood silently beside me. We watched through the glass as two private nurses in pale blue scrubs moved quietly between the two massive, sterile bedrooms.
“You’re making a mistake, Lawson,” Prescott said. His voice was low, devoid of its usual professional detachment. He was speaking to me not as my head of security, but as a man who had known me for two decades.
“A mistake is letting my children die while I write checks to hospitals that tell me to prepare for the inevitable,” I replied, staring at Jonah’s door.
“That woman is a wild card. We don’t know what kind of leverage she really has. A fourteen-year-old connection to Genevieve? A disgraced doctor? You’re grasping at smoke.”
“Then let me grasp, Prescott. If it’s smoke, I’ll fire her. If it’s fire, I’ll use it to burn down whoever is in my way.”
Before Prescott could argue further, the elevator chimed at the end of the hall. The doors slid open, and Odette stepped out, followed closely by Clara Vale.
Clara had shed her thin, worn coat. She was wearing a simple, faded navy blue sweater and dark slacks. Without the coat, she looked even more fragile, yet there was a rigid tension in her posture that suggested a steel core. She stopped a few feet away from the glass doors, her eyes taking in the clinical sterility of the east wing. I saw her chest rise and fall in a slow, deep breath.
“They are asleep,” I said, turning to face her. “Jonah’s white blood cell count plummeted again last night. Blythe is marginally stable, but her bone marrow biopsies are mirroring her brother’s. The top pediatric oncologists in the country are calling it an aggressive, idiopathic form of acute myeloid leukemia. But they admit the genetic markers don’t align perfectly. It’s a ghost disease.”
Clara stepped closer to the glass, her hands pressed flat against her sides. “It’s not idiopathic if Genevieve knew it was coming.”
The words felt like a knife twisting in my ribs. “Genevieve didn’t know it was coming. She feared it might. There is a difference.”
“Is there?” Clara turned to look at me, and for a moment, the vast difference in our wealth and status vanished. We were just two people standing on the edge of a cliff. “If she feared it enough to lock away records and make me promise to find you, she knew something the doctors didn’t.”
I swiped my security badge over the scanner on the wall. The heavy glass doors hissed open with a pressurized seal breaking. The smell of hospital-grade antiseptic washed over us, entirely erasing the scent of beeswax and fresh flowers that permeated the rest of the mansion.
“Come,” I ordered.
I led her down the hall to Jonah’s room. I pushed the door open softly. The room was bathed in the dim, blue light of the monitoring equipment. Jonah, seven years old and frighteningly pale, lay in the center of a massive bed. Wires and IV tubes snaked from his thin arms to the machines that beeped in a slow, agonizing rhythm. His dark hair—so like Genevieve’s—was thinning.
Clara stood in the doorway. I watched her carefully. Most people, when they saw my children, offered pity. They covered their mouths, their eyes watered, they murmured hollow condolences.
Clara did none of those things. Her eyes darted around the room, taking in the machines, the IV drips, the charts at the end of the bed. Her expression wasn’t sad; it was analytical. It was the face of a woman who had spent years navigating the bureaucratic nightmares of the medical system.
“Who is the lead attending?” she asked quietly.
“Dr. Aris Thorne. Head of Pediatric Oncology at Chicago Memorial. He visits twice a week. We have round-the-clock nursing staff here.”
Clara nodded slowly. She walked to the foot of the bed and picked up the thick medical chart.
“Excuse me,” a sharp voice rang out. One of the nurses, a stern-faced woman named Beatrice, stepped into the room. “You cannot touch that. Patient records are strictly confidential.”
Clara didn’t drop the chart. She didn’t even flinch. She simply looked over her shoulder at me.
“Miss Vale is my new Private Medical Archivist,” I told the nurse, my tone leaving no room for debate. “She has full clearance to review all medical documentation regarding Jonah and Blythe.”
Beatrice looked scandalized, looking from me to Prescott, but Prescott only gave a curt, affirming nod. Beatrice huffed and stepped back into the hallway.
Clara opened the chart. She flipped through the dense pages of blood panels, imaging reports, and pharmacological logs with surprising speed. Her eyes tracked the data like someone reading a second language fluently.
“You said Dr. Sethi’s license was suspended,” Clara murmured, still reading.
“Eighteen months ago,” Prescott answered from the doorway. “According to the public filings, it was related to unauthorized clinical trials. She was using unapproved gene therapies on terminal patients.”
Clara stopped turning the pages. She stared at a specific blood panel from two weeks ago. “Unapproved gene therapies,” she repeated, her voice barely a whisper.
She closed the chart with a sharp snap and turned to me. The analytical calm was gone, replaced by a sudden, electric intensity.
“I need a laptop. A secure internet connection. And I need the private contact information for the research archive where Genevieve stored the original genetic counseling results.”
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“Why?” I demanded.
“Because,” Clara said, her eyes flashing, “Dr. Sethi didn’t lose her license for malpractice. She lost it for being fourteen years ahead of the FDA. And if I’m right about what’s in this chart, Jonah doesn’t have leukemia, Mr. Mercer. He has exactly what Genevieve’s mother had. And Dr. Sethi is the only person on earth who knows how to rewrite it.”
