The sleek town car that had dropped Elena off at the foot of her shabby street felt like a relic from a dream, the contract in her hands its cold, waking reality. The walk to the house was a blur of numb dread. The navy silk dress, so elegant hours ago, now felt like a ridiculous costume against the cracked pavement and peeling paint of her neighborhood.
She let herself in through the kitchen door, hoping for silence, for a few moments to think in the garage with the piano before facing the interrogation she knew was coming.
She was not so lucky.
Veronica was at the kitchen table, a glass of white wine half-empty before her, a ledger open. Her eyes, sharp and perpetually calculating, lifted as Elena entered. They did a quick, thorough inventory: the expensive dress, the styled hair the hospital PR team had arranged, the shell-shocked expression Elena couldn't hide.
"Well," Veronica said, setting her pen down with deliberate slowness. "Look at you. Quite the transformation. How was the *soiree* at the tower?"
Elena placed the folder containing the contract on the counter, as if distance could diminish its power. "It was fine. A ceremony. They signed some papers."
"Fine," Veronica echoed, her voice a dry whip. "They summon you personally, dress you up, parade you around their glass palace, and it's 'fine'? Don't be obtuse, Elena. What did he want?"
Elena's shoulders tightened. She considered lying, but Veronica would sniff out evasion like a bloodhound. "He… offered me a job."
Veronica's posture shifted, a predator scenting prey. "A job. At Valerian Holdings? In what capacity?"
"Not at the company. A private position. As a… a health consultant." The term felt alien on her tongue.
Veronica's eyebrows shot up. "A health consultant? For Lionel Valerian himself?" A slow, avaricious smile spread across her face. It was more terrifying than her scorn. "Elena, this is exceptional. This is what I've been talking about. Positioning. Access."
"It's a medical job, Veronica," Elena insisted, a feeble protest.
"It's a *foot in the door*," Veronica corrected, rising and approaching her. Her perfume, cloying and expensive, enveloped Elena. "You must accept, of course. The salary?"
Elena mumbled the figure.
Veronica's breath hitched audibly. Her eyes gleamed with pure, unadulterated greed. "You see? This is providence. This is how you dig us out of the hole your father's… choices left us in." She picked up the contract folder, her fingers caressing the thick paper. "You will accept. And you will do more. You will be indispensable. You will make yourself so valuable that he will listen to what you have to say. My friend Margot has a venture—a line of sustainable wellness products. It just needs the right backing. An introduction, Elena. That's all you need to arrange."
The audacity of it, the sheer transactional cruelty, made Elena feel ill. "I'm not going to ask him to invest in your friend's pyramid scheme! This is a medical contract, not a… a networking opportunity!"
Veronica's smile vanished, replaced by a familiar, icy mask. She stepped closer, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper. "You will do what is necessary for this family. Or have you forgotten that you live under this roof? Do you eat the food I buy? That your father's failures are a millstone around *my* neck?" She leaned in, her eyes boring into Elena's. "This is your chance to be useful finally. Please don't mess it up as you did with your father's treatments. Pushing for all those extra, futile procedures, running up bills for a man who was already dead. You have a chance to fix one of the many messes you've made. Don't be sentimental. Be smart."
The words were a precise, practiced strike, aimed at the rawest part of Elena's soul. The guilt over her father's suffering, the second-guessing of every medical decision she'd encouraged, the crushing weight of the debt she'd willingly assumed—Veronica twisted the knife with expert cruelty.
Elena recoiled as if slapped. Tears of rage and pain sprang to her eyes, but she refused to let them fall in front of this woman. Without a word, she snatched the contract folder back from Veronica's grasp, turned on her heel, and fled to the garage.
The silence there was a balm. She stumbled to the piano, not to play, but to collapse onto the stool, her body trembling. The contract seemed to be burning through the folder. Veronica's words echoed in her skull: *… as you did with your father's treatments.*
She had been so young, so desperate to believe there was hope. She had advocated for, researched, and pushed for every new, expensive option. Had she prolonged his suffering for her own selfish hope? The doctors had said no, but in the dark of night, the doubt always crept in. And Veronica had just weaponized it.
Elena pulled her father's stethoscope from its place on the piano. She held the cold chestpiece in her palm, then, as she had done a thousand times before, she placed the eartips in and pressed the diaphragm to her own heart. The sound was a rapid, frightened thrumming.
*Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub.*
A living heart. Beating in a body trapped by the past, by debt, by a venomous woman in the kitchen, and now by the offer of a mysterious, terrifying man in a tower.
The contract offered escape. It provided the money to silence the collectors, to buy her way out of Veronica's house, to lay the financial ghost of her father to rest, finally. But the price was a year of her life given to Lionel Valerian, a being she did not understand, who looked at her with eyes that saw a resource, not a person.
Tears she had held back in the kitchen finally spilled over, tracing hot paths down her cheeks. She cried silently in the dark garage, her forehead pressed against the cool wood of the piano, the steady, living sound of her own heartbeat in her ears the only comfort in a world that seemed determined to sell her to the highest bidder, one way or another.