Stepmother Beats Poor Waitress For Feeding Stray Dog — The Mafia Boss Saw Her Scars & Takes Action

Chapter 10

Rosalind Hearn was a forty-four-year-old civil attorney with an office on the ninth floor of a building on LaSalle Street. And she worked with the practiced patience of someone who’d spent twenty years proving things everyone knew were true, but no one was willing to put in writing.

She received the file on a Tuesday afternoon and called back on Thursday afternoon.

She spread four folders across her desk in order and began with the one on the far left.

The first contained the hospital bills.

Mr. Gerald Whitfield had been admitted to Mercy Medical Center in the fall seven years earlier, remained there for thirty-one days, and died in the hospital.

The total amount owed after insurance was $41,300.

The second folder contained records from that same hospital’s financial assistance program.

An application for debt relief had been submitted two months after his death. It had been approved. The entire remaining balance had been forgiven under the hospital’s assistance program for low-income patients.

Rosalind turned to the stamped page and rotated it so Cassian could read it.

There had been no debt. Not for seven years.

The third folder contained statements from Delphine Whitfield’s bank account.

Every month, on the seventh or eighth, a cash deposit appeared—ranging from four hundred to six hundred twenty dollars.

Rosalind had added them together.

Over six years, the total came to $71,800.

The fourth folder was the thinnest. It contained a printed copy of the call log from the switchboard in Mercy Hospital’s finance department, obtained through a formal records request.

Rosalind placed one finger on a line in the middle of the page.

Four years earlier, on a March afternoon, a call had been made from the public telephone at the Copper Kettle.

It lasted nine minutes.

The entry in the duty log stated that the caller had asked about the remaining hospital balance for a patient named Gerald Whitfield. The employee on duty had checked the account and explained that the file had been closed and there was no remaining balance.

Rosalind said she’d found the employee who’d been working that day. The woman still worked there. She remembered the call because the caller had asked the same question three different ways—as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

And at the end of the call, the caller had asked one more question.

She’d asked whether the hospital was absolutely certain.

Cassian sat in silence for a long time.

Then he asked what happened after that.

Rosalind turned to the fifth page. It was a photocopy of a handwritten note, filed with the hospital’s patient accounts office.

The note was dated two weeks after that phone call. It had been left by a different employee—someone working the front desk at the hospital’s billing office.

It read:

Woman came in today asking about Gerald Whitfield account. Told her again—balance is zero. She didn’t believe me. Asked to see someone in person. I showed her the stamped letter. She cried. I asked if she was all right. She said yes. She left.

Cassian closed the folder.

He understood now.

Elodie had called. She’d been told the debt was forgiven. She hadn’t believed it. She’d gone to the hospital in person, and someone had shown her the proof.

And she had cried.

Not because she was relieved.

Because she’d just learned that for four years, she’d been paying a debt that didn’t exist.

And by then, she’d already given Delphine Whitfield nearly thirty thousand dollars.

But she didn’t stop.

She kept paying.

Because Delphine had told her that if she stopped, the department would find out. And if the department found out, they’d say she wasn’t financially stable. And if they said that, she’d never get Renley back.

So she kept paying.

For two more years.

Until the morning Cassian Ror walked into that yard.