The flowers were Maya's favorite.White lilies wrapped in brown paper, tied with a simple string. Nothing extravagant. Ethan Cole had never been the flashy type. He believed in small, consistent gestures. The kind that said, "I still think about you even when I am buried under deadlines and research papers."Seven years of marriage and he still stopped at the same flower stall every anniversary.Mr. Pham, the old vendor who ran the stall outside Creston Medical Centre, had already started wrapping them before Ethan even reached the counter."Same as always, Dr. Cole?""Same as always."The old man smiled, the creases around his eyes deepening. "A man who remembers. Your wife is a lucky woman."Ethan paid, tucked the bouquet under his arm, and walked to the parking lot. He was two hours earlier than expected. The quarterly review meeting had been cut short because Chairman Gale had a flight to catch. Ethan had not even called Maya to let her know he was coming home early. He wanted to

The call from Creston Medical Centre came three days later.Ethan had been staying at a budget motel on the eastern edge of the city, the kind of place that charged by the week and did not ask questions. The room smelled like old carpet and window unit air conditioning. There was a small desk where he had spread out his files and a chair that was slightly too low for the desk so that he had to hunch forward when he worked.He had been working almost constantly.Sleep came in short, restless stretches. He would wake at three or four in the morning with his mind already running, turning over the research documentation, the timeline of the patent transfers, the specific wording of the agreements he had signed. He was building a case in his head, organizing it the way he organized a diagnostic workup, methodically, layer by layer, ruling out weaknesses and identifying the strongest points of evidence.It was the only thing keeping him functional.When his work phone rang and he saw the na

Three weeks later, Ethan was dying in an alley.Not metaphorically. Not in the way people used the word dying to mean exhausted or defeated or at the end of their rope. He was dying in the specific, clinical, measurable sense that his body was shutting down in a dark alley behind a convenience store on the corner of Mercer and Fifth and there was nobody around to help him.He had known this moment was coming.He had not known it would come this fast.The assistance programs had come to nothing. The first had a waiting list of fourteen months. The second required proof of fixed address, which a motel room did not qualify as under their specific definition. The third had funding for his condition but not his specific stage of progression, a distinction that had been explained to him with genuine apology by a patient advocate named Sheryl who had clearly delivered this particular news to too many people and had not yet found a way to make it easier.The legal case was stalled. Daniel had

The Halcyon Foundation occupied the fourteenth floor of a glass building on Alderman Street.Ethan had looked it up at the shelter the previous evening using one of the communal computers that residents were allowed to use for forty five minutes at a time. The Foundation had been established eleven years ago by a retired surgeon named Dr. Constance Halcyon who had watched too many patients fall through the gaps of an underfunded public health system and had decided to do something about it with the considerable fortune she had accumulated over a forty year career.Their mandate was specific. They funded treatment for patients whose medical situations were complex, whose conditions were serious, and whose access to care had been disrupted by circumstances beyond straightforward financial hardship. The language on their website used the phrase systemic barriers repeatedly, which Ethan had found both accurate and somewhat ironic given everything.He arrived at eight forty five in the mor

Creston Medical Centre looked exactly the same. That was the first thing Ethan noticed as he approached from the eastern side street, which brought him past the staff parking structure rather than the main entrance. The same glass and steel facade. The same rotating doors catching the afternoon light. The same ambulance bay with its organized urgency, vehicles pulling in and out with the practiced rhythm of an institution that processed emergency after emergency without pausing to mark any individual one. He had worked here for eleven years. He knew every entrance, every corridor, every shortcut between departments that saved three minutes on a busy shift. He knew which security guards worked which shifts and which ones paid attention and which ones were primarily focused on their phones. He knew that the eastern staff entrance required a swipe card he no longer had but that the door was frequently propped open between two and four in the afternoon because the orderlies used that