Overnight Empire: The Rise Of Ethan Cross

By the time Ethan reached the school nurse's office, Lily was curled on a cot, gray around her mouth, too tired to be embarrassed about it. "I'm fine," she said, the way she always said it, the way she'd said it for three weeks now while he told himself she was just tired from exams. 

"No, you're not," he simply said, squeezing her hand in his. 

Seeing Lily on the cot brought up the emotions he had been trying so hard to fight back. But he held it together, he didn't want her to see him cry. He was trying hard enough to be the adult. To be the strong one. 

The nurse walked in. "Mr Cross, can I see you briefly?"

"Sure."

The nurse took him to the hallway. "She fainted in the stairwell. This isn't that first time this term, is it?"

"No," Ethan admitted. 

"Mr Cross, I strongly recommend you take her to the emergency room tonight. Not a clinic. Tonight."

In the car, Lily leaned her head against the window, eyes half closed. "You didn't have to leave dinner early," she murmured. "I could have waited till morning."

"You fainted In a stairwell, Lily."

"People faint it's not a big deal."

"How long have you been telling yourself that?"

She didn't answer, which was enough.

That was how he ended up, four hours later, kneeling on the concrete outside St. Agatha's Charity Hospital in a rainstorm that hadn't let up once, still wearing the shirt he'd ironed twice for a dinner that felt like it had happened to someone else. 

"Please," he said to the admissions nurse. "I'll sign anything. I'll work here for the rest of my life. Just start the treatment."

"I'm sorry," she said, and she meant it, which somehow made it worse. "Without the deposit I can't even get her a bed on the ward. Corporate policy."

He called everyone. The foreman who worked him eleven hours a day. The landlord who'd thrown him and Lily out three years ago at their uncle's ward. In a moment he was already ashamed of, he'd even called Sophia, two hours after she'd ended things with me. The call went to voicemail, he left her a messag, and instead of a call back, he got a text. "Not a good time, sorry, I hope she's ok." He hadn't expected anything else. It still cost him something to be right. 

So he knelt in the rain, because there was nothing else his body knew how to do, and he made himself a promise instead of another phone call.

"Every person who's ever laughed at me," he said, quietly to no one, to the rain, to the version of himself who used to believe hard work was enough on its own. "Every person who's ever looked at me the way that table looked at me tonight. I am going to make them understand exactly how it feels like to have nothing left to beg with. I don't know how yet. But I swear it, right here, in front of this door that won't open for us."

He did not expect an answer. He got one anyway. 

"That's a very expensive promise to make with empty hands," said a voice to his left. 

Ethan turned. An old man sat on the hospital's outdoor bench, uncovered, letting the rain fall on him the same way Ethan was letting it fall on himself. Thin in the way of someone who had once been larger, wearing a coat too fine for a man alone in a downpour at midnight.

"I'm not in the mood," Ethan said. "If you're here for money, I don't have any. If you're here for anything else, I don't have room for it tonight." 

"I'm not here for either," the old man said, something almost amused in it, buried under a wet cough. "I'm here because dying men run out of patience for waiting, and I've been waiting for you longer than you'd believe."

"You don't know me."

"I know you stopped four men for swinging shovels at a stranger on a construction site four years ago, on Delancey, and never once mentioned it to anyone afterward because you didn't think it was worth mentioning." The old man's eyes, pale and steady, found his. "That stranger was me."

Ethan tried to remember his face. He was sure he had seen him somewhere. Then he remembered the event, because after that work's pay he was able to have a decent meal after days of surviving with cereals. And as of that moment, he was defending the old man with an empty stomach. 

"You don't forget a shovel," he simply said. 

"Most men in your position would have joined in," the old man said. "Instead you stood between an old fool and four men with tools and told them if they wanted to swing at anybody, they could start with you."

"I don't remember it being that dramatic."

"Memory is generous to the people who deserves it least," the old man said, and coughed again, longer this time. "Your sister will be on the third floor, room 311, once they admit her. Take this to the desk and tell them the deposit is handled." He held out a black card, unmarked, cold enough that Ethan felt it before he touched it. "Then come back out here. We don't have long."

Ethan stared at it like it might detonate. "What is this?"

"The end of kneeling," the old man said, and smiled like it hurt him to do it. "Go. Lily doesn't have time for you to be suspicious."

Ethan looked at the black card, then back at the old man, rain running off both of them In equal measure. "If this is real, why me?. Why tonight? Of all nights you could have found me?"

"Because I've been dying for three months," the old man said, "and I've spent every one of those months looking for someone who'd kneel in the rain outside a hospital instead of walking away and telling themselves there was nothing more they could do. Most men would have left an hour ago. You didn't. That's not nothing, Mr Cross. In my experience, It's almost everything."

"You make it sound like a test."

"It was," the old man admitted. " You just didn't know you were taking it."

Ethan looked at the card a moment longer, then closed his fist around it and stood, joints stiff from hours on the concrete. "I'll be right back"

"I know," the old man said. "That's exactly why I chose you."