Chapter 1 - The Fire
The first page of my medical file curled black in the fireplace while Adrian watched it burn.
I sat ten feet away in my wheelchair, one hand gripping the armrest because the stroke had left the other unreliable.
“Those records belong to me.”
Adrian tossed another folder into the flames.
“They belonged to the woman who paid the bills.”
He turned toward me, smiling.
“That woman doesn’t exist anymore.”
Across the room, Celeste stood near the staircase in an expensive cream outfit, watching my diagnosis disappear page by page.
End-stage kidney failure.
Dialysis schedule.
Medication history.
Emergency contacts.
Adrian burned everything.
“You’re broke, useless, and no longer my problem.”
I had heard cruelty before.
But hearing it from the boy I had once found shivering outside a bus station was different.
Adrian had been nine.
No coat.
No father.
No mother willing to return.
I had brought him home for one night.
That night became twenty-nine years.
I paid for school, therapy, Stanford, his first apartment, and eventually gave him an executive position inside Shaw Meridian Systems, the cybersecurity company I founded before he learned multiplication.
Now he stepped behind my wheelchair.
“Adrian.”
“What?”
“Don’t.”
He shoved.
Hard.
The chair shot backward.
My shoulder slammed into the marble wall.
Pain exploded down my side.
Celeste laughed.
Actually laughed.
“Careful,” she said. “You’ll damage the wall.”
The front door opened.
Rosa Alvarez stood there holding grocery bags.
Rain dripped from her brown delivery cap.
She saw me.
Saw Adrian.
Saw the overturned medication beside the fireplace.
“What did you do to her?”
Adrian turned.
“Mind your business.”
Rosa dropped the groceries.
“This became my business when you shoved an old woman.”
She rushed toward me.
Adrian stepped between us.
“You touch her, you’ll regret it.”
Rosa looked directly into his face.
Then walked around him.
She wrapped her coat around my shoulders.
Adrian’s expression hardened.
Minutes later, he rolled my wheelchair into the rain, threw a garbage bag of medication beside the curb and pointed toward the street.
“Take her to a shelter.”
Celeste folded her arms.
“Preferably far away.”
Rosa pushed me toward her dented sedan.
I never looked back.
Not until we reached the gate.
Then I turned.
Adrian was watching.
I held his eyes.
And smiled.
His grin faltered.
Because underneath the cushion of my wheelchair, hidden behind a stitched lining Adrian had never noticed, was a black encrypted drive.
He had burned my medical records.
May you like
But he had left me with something far more dangerous.
A complete record of him.
