Part 1
The only thing keeping the room alive was the monitor.
A steady beep. A green line. A billionaire who hadn’t opened his eyes in six months.
St. Gabriel Medical Center, downtown Chicago—private ICU suite, the kind with hush money silence and frosted-glass doors. To everyone else, Henry Duval was a headline in a bed: tech investor, crash on the I-90, “vegetative state,” family waiting for a miracle that never came.
To me—Claire Martin, night-shift RN—he was… different.
I didn’t tell anyone that.
I just stayed.
