Chapter 2 - The Seattle Flight
Within twenty-four hours, Arthur Vance had moved mountains. He didn’t just freeze the accounts; he arranged for a private medical transport. While Marcus was busy screaming at bank tellers in a downtown lobby, I was holding Lily’s hand in the back of an air ambulance soaring over the Pacific Northwest.
Dr. Aris met us at the tarmac. He was a brilliant, no-nonsense oncologist who looked at Lily not as a lost cause, but as a fighter.
“The trial is aggressive, Elena,” Dr. Aris warned as they transferred Lily to her new room in the Seattle research hospital. “Her body is already weak. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
“Do whatever it takes,” I said.
Back in our hometown, Marcus and Chloe were finding out just how thorough my father’s legal planning had been. My phone buzzed incessantly with voicemails. At first, they were angry. Marcus threatening legal action, Chloe crying about how I was starving her unborn child. But as the days passed, the tone shifted to sheer desperation.
They had tried to return to the house—the beautiful four-bedroom colonial we had lived in for five years. But Arthur had beaten them there. Because the house was purchased entirely with my inheritance, it belonged to the trust. Arthur had changed the locks, hired private security, and left Marcus’s and Chloe’s belongings in garbage bags on the front lawn.
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I sat by Lily’s bed, listening to a voicemail from my sister. “Elena, please. We’re staying at a cheap motel. Marcus can’t pay for my prenatal vitamins. You can’t do this to your own flesh and blood.”
I deleted the message. She stopped being my sister the day she decided my daughter’s death was a convenient financial windfall.
