The Prisoner Son Returns as the Medical Saint

Chapter 10: Fooling her

"Mark was upset," Jenna continued, her voice picking up a righteous tremble. "He was doing it for you, Eliza. Think about it. Edward just walked out of prison and he already has another woman at his side. Which means while he was sitting in that cell all those years, who knows what was happening. He must have been involved with her long before today." 

She shook her head slowly. "Mark just wanted to ask him about it. For your sake. And Edward flew into a rage, completely out of control, and attacked him. And that woman, she had bodyguards with her. Real ones. Big men. They held us down and that is how Mark's leg ended up the way it is."

The lobby was still moving around them, feet crossing the floor, a PA system murmuring somewhere overhead. Eliza stood in the middle of it and looked at her mother's face carefully.

She did not fully believe it. The story was too neat and Jenna's tears arrived too precisely when they were needed.

 Eliza had known her mother for thirty years and she understood the difference between Jenna in genuine distress and Jenna performing distress for an audience of one. 

But she also knew that pushing back here, in the middle of this lobby, with Mark sitting three feet away in a wheelchair and her father's jaw set like concrete, was not a battle she had the energy to start.

She kept her face neutral and said quietly, "I believe you."

Jenna's expression shifted immediately, the wounded trembling replaced by something brisk and satisfied.

"Good," she said, straightening up. "Then do something about this ward situation because I have been standing at that desk for twenty minutes and nobody in this building seems to understand basic respect."

Eliza walked to the doctor. She stood in front of him and looked at him directly, her voice even and businesslike.

"My brother needs a VIP ward," she stated. "I understand there is a reservation issue. Can you explain the situation to me clearly?"

The doctor, visibly relieved to be speaking to someone who was not screaming, gave a small nod.

"Miss Norton, the entirety of our VIP floor has been reserved. All wards, all rooms. It was arranged in advance by a family whose patient is currently receiving care up there." He paused, then added with the careful emphasis of someone who knew the name he was about to say carried real weight. "The reservation was made by the Holden family."

The effect was immediate.

The blood left Jenna's face in one clean movement, as if someone had pulled a plug somewhere. She stood very still, her mouth slightly open, the performance she had been sustaining for the past half hour collapsing entirely into something genuine and raw.

The Holden family.

First-tier. The kind of name that made second-tier families stand up straighter and third-tier families go quiet. The kind of name that existed in a category that people like the Watsons only ever read about in newspapers and business columns. Jenna had been standing in this lobby for twenty minutes, screaming about her rights and her daughter's company and the Henderson connection, throwing her weight around like it meant something.

Against the Holden family.

She thought about what she had said to the receptionist. To the doctor. The tone she had used. The finger she had pressed against that desk. The words she had thrown around like they cost nothing.

Her throat went dry.

Ken had straightened up from beside Mark's wheelchair and was looking at the doctor now with an expression that had gone very still, the aggression in it replaced by something much more careful.

Mark looked between his parents, picking up on the shift even through the pain, his brow creasing in confusion.

Jenna pressed her lips together and said nothing at all.

She had been standing in the lobby of this hospital, making noise and demands and causing a scene that half the floor had witnessed, all while the Holden family sat quietly on the floor above her head.

She had almost, almost, made an enemy of a first-tier family.

The thought of it settled into her chest like cold water.