The silence between us is dense and heavy. Around us, the dinner continues. Crystal clinks. Voices murmur. The fire crackles behind me, and its warmth is the only thing keeping the pain from showing on my face.
"I have three conditions," I continue, because stopping now would be a weakness I don’t have time for. "I keep control of my own medical decisions. I am never hidden away or treated like an inconvenience. And whatever arrangement is made, I am treated as a wife, not property."
His chin lifts slightly. The movement is almost invisible. "Those are reasonable conditions."
"They're non-negotiable."
"I said reasonable. I didn't say negotiable." The corner of his mouth moves, and I realise with a small shock that Akyl Mostovoi is almost smiling. "I'll find you after the formal proceedings. Don't leave."
He turns and walks away. I watch him go and feel the strangest sensation underneath the cramping, nausea and exhaustion.
Hope. Fragile and unfamiliar and terrifying.
I crush it immediately. Hope is a luxury I abandoned three years ago, when the diagnosis came and the money didn't. When the world continued turning as though a woman slowly being consumed by her own body was not a matter of urgency.
I stand by the fire and wait while the pain hums through me like a current I learned to carry without letting it show.
Akyl
I read her file in the study while my brothers negotiate with their chosen women elsewhere. Rovin is already completely enraptured by the disgraced senator’s daughter, which surprised me, in a good way. He needs a challenge.
Medical records. Employment history. Financial statements. The file is thin where family should be, her parents are listed as deceased, father from a heart attack just last year, mother from cancer three years previous, and thick where suffering should never be documented this extensively.
Three doctor referrals dismissed. Two specialists who declined to operate because she couldn't pay the surgical fee up front. One open referral that she hasn’t returned calls to. I make a note of the name, Dr Richard S. Hale.
Her employment record reads like a list of how hard she’s fought to keep going. Temp placements, one after another since her father passed, office admin, data entry, reception cover, the kind of work that needs you upright and professional every single hour. Nine jobs in three years. The gaps between them line up with her medical records, flares that lasted weeks, hospital trips that ended in a paracetamol prescription and a note telling her to go home and rest.
Rest. As though rest is something available to a woman with bills to pay.
Her financial records are the worst part. Not because they are dramatic, but because they are relentlessly ordinary. One current account that fluctuates between solvent and overdrawn. Transactions at pharmacies for over-the-counter painkillers. A regular payment to a medical charity that she maintained even when her account was in negative numbers, five dollars a month, donated to a fund for women who can't afford healthcare.
She was giving money she didn't have to help other women access treatment she couldn't afford for herself.
Her savings account is useless, and likely something that just came with her current account. The interest rate is below zero, and just as she manages to build a decent amount, it all goes to ob/gyn clinics that tell her the same thing.
Rest. Exercise. Healthy diet…
I set the file down and walk to the window.
The skyline shows a familiar territory. But tonight the city looks different. Tonight, I am looking at it through the lens of a woman who has been living amongst the lights of it in pain for three years. Who has been navigating its systems, being processed and dismissed and redirected and abandoned by the very structures designed to catch people before they fall.
She didn't fall. That's the thing that I keep returning to. She should have fallen but she didn't. She found temp work. She rationed her medication. She maintained her rent, barely. She donated to charity. She got dressed tonight in a beautiful dress I know she can’t afford, and she stood in heels that are causing her visible pain. Then she entered a room full of predators with a strategy and three non-negotiable conditions.
She didn't fall because she wouldn't let herself. The cost of that refusal is written in every line of her medical records and her financial statements.
There’s a kind of anger that lives right where strategy and feeling meet, and it’s a place I almost never go, because I’ve spent my whole life keeping the two apart. Strategy is useful. Feeling gets you killed. I learned that from my father, who was all feeling, all rage, all the violence he called love and that felt like living inside a storm.
I’m not my father. I’m the opposite of my father. I’m precision where he was chaos. I’m silence where he was noise. I’m control where he was destruction.
But right now, reading about a woman who has been systematically failed by every institution designed to help her, I feel something that doesn’t fit neatly into the categories I have constructed.
It’s not pity. Pity is condescension wearing a kind face. Pity looks down.
What I feel looks outward. At the doctors who dismissed her. At the one who offered help in exchange for a sum of money that was impossible for her to find. At a world that told a woman in agony that she was being dramatic and then left her to manage the pain alone.
Rage. Clean and cold and patient, the kind that doesn’t burn out. The kind that just settles in and stays.
I pick up my phone and call my personal physician.
