Page 165 of Lady and the Hitman
I froze. “What is this?”
She swallowed hard. “We couldn’t pay the premiums, Zara.”
The room tilted.
“What?”
Her voice was barely audible. “We let the policy lapse. We thought … we thought we could get caught up before anything happened. Before anything serious. Your dad didn’t want to tell you. He said you were already stretched too thin. And I thought we’d be fine. Just one month. Then two. Then we missed the grace period. Then it was gone.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the chest.
“No health insurance?” I whispered.
She nodded, tears welling now. “None.”
The blood drained from my face. “So, that procedure?—”
“Out of pocket,” she choked. “I called just last week to try and reinstate coverage. They said no. Said we’d have to wait for open enrollment in November. That it was too late.”
I stood up, too fast. My body felt wrong. My limbs disconnected from my brain. “You should have told me.”
She winced. “I know.”
“You should’ve told me months ago.”
“I didn’t want to scare you,” she said, her voice breaking. “You finally seemed happy. You were smilingagain. You had that sparkle in your eye I hadn’t seen in years, and I didn’t want to ruin it.”
I pressed both palms to my forehead. “You didn’t ruin it. This is ruining it.”
She flinched.
I turned away, chest heaving.
My dad—my sweet, quiet, strong-as-oak father—lay unconscious behind us while the people who loved him most were scrambling to figure out how to keep him alive.
I stared at the monitor beside his bed. Numbers blinking. Steady, for now.
“What’s the cost?” I asked, not turning around.
She was silent for a beat. Then: “The hospital estimates between seventy-five and a hundred and twenty thousand. Before travel. Before pre-op. Before recovery.”
I laughed. A short, sharp sound. It wasn’t funny.
“Do we have anything?” I asked.
“No. The nursery’s in debt. The mortgage is behind.”
I closed my eyes.
My knees gave out.
I sank to the floor beside the hospital bed and clutched the base like it might hold me up.
This was the moment, I realized. The ground didn’t just shift—it cracked. Everything I thought mattered an hour ago—Ronan, Trevor, even Alpha Mail—none of it stood a chance in the face of this.
This was the thing that broke me.
And I couldn’t fix it.
