Every woman who had smiled at her over tea and praised her son’s success now backed away the moment she asked for real help. She threw the phone onto the couch.
“Hypocrites,” she hissed.
Ethan watched with open disgust. “You finally getting it?” he said. “Their friendship lasts exactly as long as you look successful. Same as my colleagues.”
Now it was his turn to swallow his pride. He started calling people from work.
“Hey, Fred. Sorry to bother you.”
“What’s up?” asked one of the senior surgeons.
“Nothing major,” Ethan said, swallowing hard. “I’ve got a great investment opportunity overseas. Need some cash fast. About a million. Think you could help?”
The man laughed outright. “Wow, Parker. Playing Wall Street now? With your apartment and your car, I figured you were doing just fine.”
“Afraid not. Just helped my son with a down payment on a townhouse. Good luck.”
The line clicked off.
Ethan clenched his jaw. Everyone had assumed he was wealthy. That had been the whole point of the image. Now that same image was working against him. No one believed he needed help. No one wanted to rescue a man who had spent years acting above everyone else.
He called several more doctors. The answers were all the same.
Finally, desperate, he did the one thing he never thought he would do. He made an appointment with the hospital administrator. Maybe the hospital would loan him the money in exchange for years of service.
In the administrator’s spacious office, Ethan laid out the facts in clipped, clinical language. The man listened with sympathy.
“Doctor Parker, this is tragic,” he said. “We’ll do everything we can to maximize your insurance coverage.”
“That’s not enough. I need to get to Singapore. Could the hospital loan me the money? I’ll pay it back from my salary for the rest of my life if I have to.”
For the first time in years, Ethan sounded almost humble.
The administrator spread his hands. “Ethan, we’re a medical institution, not a lending company. Numbers like that aren’t approved even for senior leadership. We can only work within policy.”
That answer hit harder than the diagnosis itself. Money. It all came down to money.
Ethan left the building on numb legs. The trap had closed. No friends. No allies. No institutional support. No liquid assets. Nothing.
The days that followed were grim. He went out on medical leave. HR processed it with suspicious speed, as if they had been waiting for a reason to sideline him.
Rumors spread through the hospital fast. His condition worsened. One morning he woke to find a cloudy haze over his left eye.
The disease didn’t take days off. He sat in the darkened living room of his expensive loft with the curtains drawn. Rita had shut herself in her bedroom.
Was she crying? Lying in bed in shock? He didn’t care.
He stared at the glowing screen of his phone.
Hundreds of contacts. Not one real friend. He started deleting numbers. Maria—influential but useless. Gone. Carter, the flatterer. Gone. Joanna, the social climber. Gone.
He erased them by the dozen, feeling nothing but emptiness. Soon only a few distant relatives remained, people too poor to help with anything.
Then his thumb stopped on the letter M.
Marina.
The name burned on the screen. Valerie’s friend. The one remaining thread that might lead back to the woman he had thrown away.
His face flushed with shame. To call that number would mean hitting bottom. It would mean admitting he had become exactly what he once despised—someone desperate, dependent, and out of options.
But Valerie had once given everything for him without asking for anything back. And now her final words came back to him.
You’re going to regret tonight.
She had been right. And now the regret had taken physical form.
He stared at the screen. His fingers trembled from spasms and fear. He had no choice left.
All the arrogance with which he had humiliated his wife was worthless now. For nearly an hour he hovered over the call button, unable to press it. Every time he tried, he could hear his mother’s old voice in his head.
“She’s not our kind of people.”
Shame tightened around his throat. This call would be surrender. An admission that the plain woman he had dismissed was now his last chance.
Then pain stabbed through his left eye again, and the blind spot widened. Fear beat pride. He shut down the voice in his head and pressed call.
One ring.
Two.
Three.
Just when he thought no one would answer, the line clicked open.
No hello. Just silence.
“Uh… good evening,” he said awkwardly. “Marina.”
A dry laugh came through the phone. “Well, look at that. The great Dr. Parker found time for my number after all,” she said. “Amazing.”
“Marina…”
