Chapter 3 - The Hospital Room
The waiting room of the Asheville medical center smelled of industrial floor wax and stale antiseptic.
When I pushed through the double doors, the fluorescent lights hummed a harsh, sterile tune. My father was sitting alone in a blue plastic chair in the corner, his shoulders rounded, looking older and smaller than he had when he sat behind us in court. Craig was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s Craig?” I asked, walking over to him.
My father looked up, his eyes red-rimmed and hollow. “He took a flight back to his restaurant in Charleston two hours ago. He said he couldn't deal with the fallout. Said his business partners were threatening to pull out if his name got dragged into a federal land fraud investigation.”
Of course he did. When things fell apart, Craig always found a door out.
“How is she?” I asked, looking toward the heavy wooden door of room 312.
“She’s awake,” my father said softly, staring down at his calloused hands. “The doctor says she’ll recover her speech and mobility over time, but she shouldn't have been playing games with people like Horizon Ridge, Holly. We were in over our heads from the start. Your mother... she thought she could out-maneuver everybody. She forgot that some things are rooted deeper than paper.”
I didn't answer right away. I walked over to the door of room 312 and pushed it open just an inch.
My mother lay propped up in the adjustable hospital bed, a thin plastic IV line taped to the back of her pale hand. Her graying hair was loose against the pillow, and her eyes were fixed on the small television mounted in the corner, playing a muted cable news broadcast.
When she heard the door creak, her head turned slowly.
For a second, the sharp, defensive pride that had defined her entire life flickered in her eyes. But as she looked at me—standing there in my blazer, carrying Grandpa’s cedar box under my arm—the mask finally cracked.
“You came,” she whispered, her voice thick and uneven from the stroke.
“Dad called,” I said, stepping into the room and closing the door behind me. I set the cedar box down on the bedside tray table.
She stared at the box. Her lips trembled. “Your grandfather... he never trusted me, Holly. Even when I married your father, even when I helped run the family books for thirty years, he knew I looked at land as something to be traded, not something to be kept.”
“He didn't need to trust you to know what you’d do,” I said quietly, pulling a chair up beside the bed. “That’s why he gave the minerals to me.”
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She closed her eyes, a single tear escaping down her cheek. “Horizon Ridge is coming after us, Holly. The contract I signed with them... if they don't get the sub-surface rights, they’re going to sue us for breach of contract. They’ll take this hospital room, they’ll take our home, they’ll take everything your father and I spent forty years building.”
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