THE WOMEN IN BLACK
Chapter 01 - THE WOMEN IN BLACK
Gabriel Price had never liked the private wing at St. Catherine’s.
It was too quiet.
The carpet was too thick. The nurses spoke in half-whispers. The doors closed without sound, and the wealthy families inside them paid extra for privacy that too often looked like disappearance.
He learned that from his mother.
Or rather, from losing her.
So when a hospital administrator called him at 6:17 p.m. and said his wife had been admitted after a “domestic fall,” Gabriel did not wait for the elevator to reach the lobby. He took the stairs two at a time, briefcase hitting his leg, dress shoes slipping once on the polished landing.
Domestic fall.
He had heard rich people use language like that his whole life.
A woman didn’t get shoved. She became unsteady.
A child wasn’t frightened. He was sensitive.
A wife didn’t scream for help. She had an episode.
By the time he reached Room 614, his shirt collar was open, his breathing sharp, and the old fear he thought he had outgrown had its hand around his throat.
He pushed the door open.
The first thing he saw was the bed.
Not the window.
Not the flowers.
Not the two women in black seated along the far wall.
The bed.
His wife, Maren, lay beneath pale blue sheets with the side rail raised, her dark hair tangled against the pillow, her mouth swollen at one corner, one cheek bruised in a yellow-purple bloom that had no business on her face.
There were small cuts near her jaw.
A scrape at her temple.
A hospital bracelet on her wrist.
An IV line running into the back of her hand.
She looked too small in that expensive room.
That was what broke him first.
Maren Price was not a small woman. She was thirty-four, sharp-minded, brown-eyed, and capable of stopping a roomful of donors with one quiet question. She once told a senator that charity without accountability was just guilt wearing perfume.
Now she looked like someone had tried to make her vanish one bruise at a time.
“Gabe,” she whispered.
He was at her side before he felt himself move.
“What happened?”
The two women stood.
Celeste Price, his stepmother, was fifty-two and still beautiful in the polished, breathless way women become when money keeps them lacquered. She wore a black cashmere coat over a black dress and pearl earrings his father had given Gabriel’s mother first.
Beside her stood Noelle Armitage, family counsel, in a charcoal suit so dark it looked black under hospital light. Noelle was forty-five, narrow-faced, careful, the sort of woman who never entered a room without knowing where the exits were.
“Gabriel,” Celeste said softly. “She’s confused. The doctors gave her medication.”
Maren’s fingers tightened on the sheet.
Gabriel did not look away from his wife.
“Tell me.”
Maren swallowed, and the movement hurt her. He saw it in the small flinch she tried to hide.
“Hubby...” Her voice cracked on the word. She lifted one trembling hand and pointed toward the two women by the chairs. “Those two did this. The file is under my bed.”
For a moment, the monitor beside her seemed louder than the whole room.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Gabriel looked down at her hand.
Then at Celeste.
Then at Noelle.
“The file?” he asked.
Noelle’s face changed.
Not enough for most people.
Enough for him.
Celeste moved first. “Maren has been under tremendous stress. She’s been looking into things she doesn’t understand.”
“What things?”
“Foundation records. Old hospital matters. Your father’s unfinished notes.”
Maren shut her eyes.
“No.”
The word came out as air.
Gabriel set his briefcase on the floor beside the bed.
Both women noticed.
That told him more than they meant to.
He looked beneath the hospital bed.
At first he saw only steel, wheels, shadows, the clean mechanical underside of a bed that cost more than most cars.
Then he saw a thin recessed handle tucked into the lower frame.
A hidden tray.
A real one.
Not a drawer. Not a trick. A narrow medical document tray built into the bed base, almost invisible unless someone knew where to look.
Gabriel remembered his mother telling him, years ago, that private hospitals hid more than chart notes in pretty rooms.
He reached for it.
Noelle stepped forward.
“Don’t touch that!”
Her voice was too sharp.
Too frightened.
Celeste grabbed Noelle’s wrist so fast Gabriel almost missed it.
Maren began crying silently.
That was the worst sound in the room.
Not a sob.
Not a plea.
Just tears sliding down the side of her face while she watched her husband decide whether to believe what everyone else was about to call impossible.
Gabriel stood.
He placed himself between the women and the bed.
“Sit down,” he said. “Nobody leaves.”
Celeste lifted her chin. “Do not speak to me like I’m staff.”
His answer was quiet.
“Then stop behaving like someone who needs to be escorted out.”
Noelle sat first.
Celeste did not.
Gabriel held her stare until she did.
Then he lowered himself to one knee on the hospital floor.
The tray slid out with a soft metal whisper.
Inside lay a thick ivory folder tied with a blue ribbon.
On the cover was an official seal Gabriel had not seen since childhood: St. Catherine’s Women’s Patient Protection Board.
A board that no longer existed.
A board his mother had supposedly destroyed before she died.
His hand froze.
Maren whispered, “This file proves everything.”
Gabriel lifted the folder.
The blue seal was cracked down the center, but still intact.
Behind him, Celeste made a sound so small it might have been a breath.
Noelle whispered, “Oh God.”
Gabriel looked from one woman to the other and understood something cold and immediate.
They had not been afraid the file would be found.
They were afraid of which file it was.
Then the hospital door opened behind him.
A nurse in her sixties stepped in, saw the blue seal in his hand, and went pale.
“Mr. Price,” she said carefully, “where did your wife get that?”
Gabriel stood slowly.
“Why?”
The nurse looked at Maren with something that was not surprise.
It was recognition.
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“Because,” she said, “the last woman who opened a blue-seal file in this hospital was your mother.”
Read Chapter 2 to learn why Gabriel’s mother was connected to the file under Maren’s bed.
