2026-02-22 14:36:58"It went through!" Joshua's voice cracked with relief and triumph. "The payment was successful! Look!"
Patricia's eyes narrowed as she glanced at her own phone, then back at Joshua with undisguised disgust. "Who knows how much you actually paid? Your piece of junk phone was freezing and lagging like crazy. For all we know, you transferred ten dollars and think you're clever."
Joshua's elation faltered. In his panic and desperation, with the phone screen stuttering and freezing, he honestly couldn't remember how many zeros he'd typed. But he was certain—he had to have paid at least ten thousand dollars. Maybe more.
"I can check the transfer record," Joshua said quickly. "Just let me—"
"Check the record?" Patricia snatched the phone from his hand before he could react. "Who knows if you'll just fake another screenshot? We're checking the hospital account directly. The real account. Not your photoshopped fantasy."
She pulled out her own phone, dialing with sharp, aggressive jabs at the screen. "Yes, this is Nurse Patricia Wilson from the ICU floor. I need you to check if we've received a payment. Medical expenses for a patient named..." She glanced at the chart, "...Mrs. Elizabeth Hart. The amount should be one hundred thousand dollars."
Joshua held his breath, his heart pounding. The payment had gone through. He'd seen the confirmation.
Patricia's expression shifted from professional inquiry to smug satisfaction. "Uh-huh. I see. No, nothing? Are you absolutely sure?" She paused, listening. "Right. Thank you."
She ended the call and turned to Joshua with a venomous smile. "Finance says no payment of one hundred thousand dollars has been received. What a surprise."
"That's impossible," Joshua protested. "I saw the confirmation—"
"You saw what you wanted to see," Jennifer cut in, her voice dripping with contempt. "Probably got confused by all those numbers you're not used to seeing."
Susan laughed sharply. "I bet he transferred ten bucks and thought he was being generous."
"Give me my phone back," Joshua demanded, reaching for it. "I'll show you the exact amount—"
Patricia held the phone high above her head, well out of Joshua's reach. "I don't think so. You've wasted enough of our time with your lies and theatrics."
She turned to the security desk phone mounted on the wall nearby and pressed the call button. "Security? This is Nurse Wilson on the fourth floor. I need two guards up here immediately. We have a vagrant causing a disturbance and attempting to defraud the hospital."
"I'm not a vagrant!" Joshua's voice rose. "I paid! There must be some kind of error—"
"The only error here is you," Patricia snapped. "You and your sickly mother have taken advantage of this hospital's generosity for the last time. When security gets here, they're throwing both of you out onto the street where you belong. You can beg for spare change there."
"Wait!" Joshua's mind raced. In his panic with the lagging phone, maybe he had made a mistake with the amount. "Okay, maybe—maybe I didn't enter the full amount correctly. But I know I paid at least ten thousand dollars. I can pay the remaining ninety thousand right now—"
The three nurses erupted into laughter.
"Ten thousand?" Patricia gasped between her cackling. "Oh, that's rich! I think you paid ten dollars and you're trying to pull a fast one on us!"
"You're pathetic," Jennifer added, shaking her head with exaggerated pity. "You really think we're stupid enough to fall for this?"
"I'll prove it," Joshua said desperately. "Just give me back my phone. Let me show you the transaction history—"
"Not a chance," Patricia said coldly. "You've proven yourself to be a liar and a con artist. The phone stays with me until security arrives."
Joshua felt panic clawing at his chest. His mother was still lying on the gurney, helpless and dying, while these nurses treated him like garbage. He opened his mouth to argue further when the sound of rapid footsteps echoed through the corridor.
A middle-aged man in an expensive suit came rushing down the stairs from the upper administrative floors, his face flushed and his breathing heavy. He clutched a tablet in one hand and his phone in the other.
Patricia's eyebrows rose in recognition. "Mr. Bernard? What are you doing down here?"
Robert Bernard was the hospital's chief financial officer, a man who typically spent his days in the executive suite and rarely ventured to the patient floors. His presence was unexpected, to say the least.
Patricia's smug expression returned full force. "Actually, perfect timing. You can personally confirm for this con artist that he hasn't paid a single cent toward his mother's medical bills."
Bernard barely glanced at her, his attention fixed on his tablet screen. "I don't have time for this," he muttered irritably. "The hospital just received the largest single transfer in its entire history. One hundred million dollars. One. Hundred. Million. I can't reach Director Matthews and I need to find him immediately. This is unprecedented—"
Patricia's jaw dropped. Then she recovered, turning to Joshua with even more vicious mockery. "Did you hear that? One hundred million dollars. That's what real wealth looks like. Someone out there just paid enough money to buy this entire hospital without blinking an eye." She leaned closer to Joshua, her voice dripping with scorn. "And you? You can't even scrape together a hundred dollars. You're nothing. Less than nothing."
"Some people have class," Susan added, nodding sagely. "And some people are just leeches on society."
Bernard was already walking away, muttering under his breath as he scrolled through his tablet. "Who is this person? Joshua Hart... Never heard the name before. How does someone quietly transfer one hundred million dollars without any prior contact?"
The corridor went utterly silent.
It was as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the space. Patricia's face, which had been twisted in smug satisfaction just seconds ago, went deathly pale. Jennifer's mouth fell open. Susan actually stumbled backward.
Joshua felt the world slow down around him.
"What..." Patricia's voice came out as a croak. She lunged forward, grabbing Bernard's arm so forcefully that he nearly dropped his tablet. "What did you just say? Who was the payment from?"
Bernard frowned, clearly annoyed at being detained. "I don't have time to—"
"The name!" Patricia's voice was shrill now, almost hysterical. "What was the name of the person who made the transfer?"
Bernard pulled his arm free, glancing at his tablet screen again with obvious impatience. "Joshua Hart. The payment came from a Joshua Hart." He looked up, his irritation evident. "Why? Do you know him?"
All three nurses' heads swiveled in unison toward Joshua, their faces frozen in expressions of dawning horror.
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Chapter 67
In truth, Mark didn't really know much about Joshua's visits to the hospital.He knew about the mother — Elizabeth Hart, ICU ward, chronic condition, the medical bills that had been the central leverage point of Joshua's entire existence in the Cavesh household for three years. That part was established fact, documented in the household accounts he had managed and manipulated for longer than he cared to calculate precisely.But the recent hospital activity — the visits, the movements, whatever Joshua's connection to Mercy General had become in the last two weeks — that was the part Mark had been filling in with inference rather than intelligence. He had said significant portion of his time has been spent in the vicinity of Mercy General with the smooth confidence of someone citing verified tracking data, and what he had actually been citing was a two-day-old observation from a source he no longer had.The source was Jennifer.Jennifer had been a nurse on the ICU floor — not Patricia W
Chapter 66
Mark told Natalie that Monica was working at Galaxy for a reason.He said it with the smooth, unhurried confidence of a man delivering the final piece of a puzzle he had assembled himself — which was, though only he knew this, precisely the problem. He had assembled it himself. From fragments. From the surface-level records that had survived his contact's access being revoked, from reasonable-sounding inferences he had dressed in the language of verified fact, from the particular skill he had developed over years of managing information flows — the skill of making incomplete pictures look complete.What he was telling Natalie was approximately fifteen percent verified and eighty-five percent constructed. The construction was good. It held together. It had the texture of research rather than invention.He knew this. He continued anyway."She didn't walk into Galaxy Tech on merit," Mark said, his voice carrying the flat certainty of someone reading from a confirmed source. "She was plac
Chapter 65
Seeing how Natalie was reacting to the news, Mark became bolder.He had been watching her carefully throughout the morning — reading her responses with the practiced sensitivity of a man who had spent years calibrating his approach to her moods and had developed, through that calibration, an instinct for exactly when she was most receptive to being pushed further. The confidence the report had restored to her was real and visible and it had loosened something in her posture, in the quality of her attention, in the particular way she was leaning toward the information rather than away from it.This was the moment.He reached into the second folder he had brought — the one he hadn't opened yet, the one he had been holding in reserve — and he set it on the desk in front of her with the deliberate, unhurried movement of someone producing a card they have been holding since the beginning of the game."There's something else about Monica Sterling," he said.Natalie looked at the folder. The
Chapter 64
Feeling confident, Natalie became angry.It was a particular kind of anger — not the hot, uncontrolled variety that had broken through on the corridor of Cavesh Industries when she'd heard Joshua's voice on Mark's phone, but the cold, focused kind that arrived after reassurance rather than before it. The kind that didn't destabilize a person but concentrated them. That took the diffuse anxiety of the past week and compressed it into something with a specific direction and a specific target.She stood from her desk and walked to the window.The city spread out below the fourteenth floor in its usual ordered arrangement — the morning traffic building on the main boulevard, the buildings catching the early light at angles that made them look briefly significant before the day rendered them ordinary again. She looked at it with the flat, assessing eyes of a woman who had spent her entire professional life treating the city as a landscape to be navigated rather than admired."He thinks he'
Chapter 63
Natalie felt reassured.It happened gradually as Mark walked her through the report — the tight, compressed anxiety that had been sitting in her chest since the night outside the Grand Meridian loosening degree by degree, the uncomfortable uncertainty that had been accumulating since The White Whale beginning to resolve itself back into the familiar, solid ground of knowing exactly what she was dealing with.Joshua Hart was dependent on a woman.Again.The pattern was so consistent it was almost comforting in its predictability — the man had spent three years attaching himself to Natalie's resources and name and had apparently, the moment those resources were withdrawn, located a replacement host with the instinctive efficiency of something that survived purely through proximity to stronger organisms. A well-resourced assistant with access to money that wasn't hers, providing a villa and a lawyer and the appearance of independence to a man who had demonstrated, throughout their entire
Chapter 62
Monica agreed without hesitation."I'll have three firms shortlisted by tonight," she said. Her voice carried the same professional steadiness it always carried, but underneath it was something that had been present since the hotel terrace conversation — a quality of investment that went beyond the contractual. She was not agreeing because it was her job to agree. She was agreeing because she understood what was at stake and had already decided, in the way Monica Sterling decided things, that the outcome mattered to her personally. "I'll prioritize firms with specific experience in matrimonial asset protection where infidelity evidence is the primary settlement instrument. I'll have their profiles and case histories on your desk by eight.""Good," Joshua said."The investigation into Mark Sullivan and Natalie Cavesh's relationship," Monica continued, her tone shifting slightly into the clipped, operational register she used for complex logistics. "I'll commission a private investigati
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