Chapter 7 - The Desperate Pilgrimage
It was a Tuesday evening in late May when Cole Bennett finally found where she worked again.
He looked like a ghost of the man who had once swaggered through the glass towers of downtown Chicago. His tailored suits hung loose over a frame that had lost twenty pounds; his hair was uncombed, graying at the temples; and his eyes were hollowed out by months of sleepless panic, lawsuits, and federal depositions.
He waited outside the physicians' parking garage at Northbridge Medical Center for three hours, leaning against the fender of his battered rental car until he saw Claire’s gray sedan pull into the lot.
As Claire stepped out of her car, carrying her leather medical bag, Cole stepped out from the shadow of a concrete pillar.
"Claire."
She stopped dead in her tracks.
She didn't jump. She didn't gasp. She simply turned her head, her expression as cold and blank as a marble slab.
"Cole," she said, her voice dropping into a flat, level register. "You're trespassing on private hospital property. Security is stationed fifty feet away. Shall I wave them over?"
Cole rushed forward, stumbling slightly over the curb, his hands outstretched in a pathetic, pleading gesture.
"Claire, please—just five minutes. I'm begging you. I'm ruined. The board stripped my voting shares. The feds are looking at the Cayman accounts. Sloane disappeared to Brazil with what was left of my personal liquidity. I lost everything, Claire. Everything we built."
"You didn't lose everything, Cole," Claire corrected him quietly. "You got exactly what you engineered."
"I was a fool!" he cried out, his voice cracking as a group of nurses walking toward the exit glanced over with uncomfortable curiosity. "I was blind! She manipulated me, she played on my fears of not having a legacy—but it was all a lie! I have nothing left, Claire. No company, no home, no money... and no family."
He fell to his knees right there on the wet asphalt of the parking garage, his hands grabbing futilely at the hem of her trench coat.
"Please... come back. Help me salvage the patent litigation. Your testimony could save the core holdings from bankruptcy. We can rebuild Bennett Biomedical together. Just... just give me another chance."
Claire looked down at the man who had once been her world—the man who had stepped over her blood on a freezing kitchen floor to chase a ghost and a liar.
She slowly reached down and unhooked his fingers from her coat, one by one, with the clinical detachment of a surgeon removing a contaminated bandage.
"You're asking the wrong person for a miracle, Cole," Claire said, stepping backward out of his reach.
"Who else is going to help me?" he wept, his face pressed against the cold concrete. "You're a doctor! You save people! That's what you do!"
Claire adjusted the strap of her bag over her shoulder, her eyes fixed on his broken, pathetic form with absolute, unyielding clarity.
May you like
"I save lives, Cole," she said softly. "I don't resurrect the dead."
Then she turned her back on him, walked through the heavy glass doors of the hospital, and let them slide shut behind her.
