Chapter 2 - THE NAME OF THE BROTHER I BURIED
The nurse looked at the screen.
Then at Sophia.
“Father listed as Gabriel Hail.”
Everything inside me stopped.
The emergency department continued moving around us.
Phones rang.
Monitors beeped.
A child cried somewhere behind a curtain.
But I heard none of it clearly anymore.
Gabriel Hail.
My younger brother.
Dead for almost four years.
Buried beneath a black granite headstone overlooking Lake Michigan.
I turned slowly toward Sophia.
She had gone completely white.
“No,” I said.
It came out almost soundless.
Sophia closed her eyes.
The nurse immediately sensed she had stepped into something private.
“I can give you a moment.”
“No.”
I looked at the screen again.
“Read it again.”
“Mr. Hail—”
“Please.”
The nurse hesitated.
“Gabriel Alexander Hail.”
My brother’s full name.
My stomach twisted.
I looked at Lily through the glass doors of the pediatric treatment area.
Dark curls.
Small nose.
Serious brown-gray eyes I had always thought reminded me strangely of someone.
Now I knew.
Gabriel.
Not me.
Not exactly.
Our father’s eyes had been that same stormy gray.
Gabriel had inherited them more strongly than I had.
And Lily—
Lily was his daughter.
I turned back to Sophia.
“How?”
Her eyes filled.
“Marcus.”
“How?”
The word came out sharper.
She flinched.
Immediately, guilt cut through me.
Lily was twenty feet away fighting to stay conscious.
This was not the time to become the kind of man Sophia already seemed afraid of.
I lowered my voice.
“Please.”
Sophia looked at the floor.
“Gabriel and I were together.”
The world tilted.
“For how long?”
“Almost two years.”
“No.”
She looked up.
“Yes.”
“I would have known.”
“You didn’t.”
“I knew everyone in Gabriel’s life.”
“No.”
The answer landed harder than it should have.
“You knew the people he let the Hail family see.”
I stared.
“When?”
“We met five years ago.”
That meant Gabriel had been alive.
Twenty-nine.
Brilliant.
Restless.
Always fighting with our mother because she wanted him inside Hail Capital and he wanted to build medical technology instead.
“You were with him before the crash.”
Sophia swallowed.
“Yes.”
“Were you pregnant?”
“Not when he died.”
I frowned.
Then she shook her head.
“I mean—I was. I just didn’t know yet.”
My chest tightened.
“How far along?”
“Six weeks.”
Gabriel had died on a wet November night when his car left Lake Shore Drive and struck a concrete barrier.
Police called it loss of control.
No drugs.
No alcohol.
No second vehicle.
Just an accident.
My brother had been buried ten days later.
And somewhere in Chicago, the woman standing in front of me had been carrying his child.
“Why didn’t you come to us?”
Sophia laughed once.
There was no humor in it.
“I did.”
My blood turned cold.
“What?”
“I went to your mother.”
Of course.
The sentence arrived before the explanation.
“What did Eleanor do?”
Sophia’s face changed when I used my mother’s name.
Not Mrs. Hail.
Not your mother.
Eleanor.
Personal history.
“She already knew about me.”
I stared.
“How?”
“Gabriel told her six months before he died.”
“And?”
“She said I was temporary.”
My jaw tightened.
Sophia continued.
“She said Gabriel always became obsessed with projects and people, then moved on.”
“That wasn’t true.”
“I know.”
“He loved you?”
Her face broke.
“Yes.”
There was no hesitation.
That hurt in a strange way.
My brother had been in love.
And I had never known.
“Why keep you secret?”
“Because he knew what your mother would do.”
“What did she do?”
The treatment-room doors opened before Sophia could answer.
A pediatric cardiologist approached.
Dr. Hannah Lee.
“Ms. Reyes?”
Sophia moved instantly.
“Yes?”
“Lily is stable.”
Her knees nearly gave out.
I caught her elbow.
She didn’t pull away.
Dr. Lee continued.
“She had a dangerous heart-rhythm episode. We’ve corrected it for now, but her electrocardiogram suggests an inherited electrical disorder.”
Sophia’s face drained again.
“What does that mean?”
“We need more tests.”
“Is she going to die?”
The doctor softened.
“Not if we can help it.”
I felt the floor disappear beneath me anyway.
“Family history matters,” Dr. Lee said. “Especially sudden fainting, unexplained seizures, drowning, or sudden cardiac death.”
I looked at Sophia.
She looked at me.
Gabriel.
Dr. Lee noticed.
“The father?”
“My brother,” I said.
She blinked.
“Was his death cardiac-related?”
“He died in a car accident.”
“Did anyone determine why he lost control of the vehicle?”
I stopped.
“No.”
“Any history of fainting?”
My memory moved backward.
Gabriel at sixteen collapsing after a soccer game.
My mother calling it dehydration.
Gabriel at twenty-four sitting on the kitchen floor after a charity race, laughing because he had “stood up too fast.”
Gabriel once telling me his heart occasionally “kicked wrong.”
I had forgotten.
Or I had never taken it seriously.
“He fainted,” I said.
Sophia turned.
“When?”
“Several times.”
Her eyes widened.
“He told me once.”
“What?”
“That his family had bad hearts.”
My skin prickled.
Dr. Lee immediately became more serious.
“Mr. Hail, have you ever been screened?”
“I’m fine.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Sophia stared at me.
I hated doctors who sounded like board members.
“I’ve had annual physicals.”
“Routine physicals may not identify inherited rhythm disorders.”
She looked toward Lily’s room.
“We’re sending genetic testing. If her father had symptoms, first-degree relatives should be evaluated.”
I heard the words.
But something else had begun pounding in my head.
Gabriel’s heart.
Gabriel’s accident.
The $900 million company I had purchased less than an hour before Lily collapsed.
Voss Cardiac Technologies.
That was what the acquisition had been.
Voss made cardiac-monitoring systems.
Wearable rhythm sensors.
Hospital telemetry software.
Predictive arrhythmia technology.
And Gabriel Hail had worked for Voss.
For three years.
Until the night he died.
I had spent ninety days acquiring the company where my brother had built his career.
Why had I not thought about that more?
Because Gabriel’s employment there had always been framed as a short rebellious chapter before he died.
Then something else came back.
A conversation six weeks before the crash.
Gabriel sitting across from me at a steakhouse.
Angry.
“You know Voss is lying about the Sentinel numbers.”
I had barely looked up from my phone.
“What numbers?”
“False negatives.”
“Gabe, I don’t speak engineer.”
“You speak liability.”
I remembered laughing.
“Then call legal.”
His expression had hardened.
“I did.”
I had forgotten the entire conversation.
Until now.
“What is it?” Sophia asked.
I looked at her.
“Did Gabriel ever talk to you about Sentinel?”
Her face changed.
Yes.
“What did he say?”
Sophia glanced toward Dr. Lee.
Then lowered her voice.
“He said the system missed dangerous rhythms.”
Cold moved through me.
“How dangerous?”
“He said somebody was going to die.”
Dr. Lee watched us carefully.
“What system?”
I looked at her.
“Voss Sentinel.”
Her eyebrows rose.
Every cardiologist knew it.
One of the most widely used hospital and wearable rhythm-monitoring platforms in the country.
The flagship product of the company I had just purchased.
Sophia whispered:
“Gabriel was wearing one the night he died.”
I stopped breathing.
“What?”
“He was testing a prototype patch.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Police never mentioned a monitor.”
“Your mother took his personal effects from the hospital before I got there.”
My pulse began pounding.
“You went to the hospital?”
“I arrived twenty minutes after he was pronounced dead.”
I stared at her.
“She wouldn’t let me see him.”
I suddenly couldn’t feel my hands.
“What did Eleanor say?”
Sophia’s eyes filled.
“She said whatever Gabriel and I had been was over now.”
Rage came so fast my vision darkened.
Then Sophia said:
“And three weeks later, when I told her I was pregnant…”
Her voice broke.
“…she offered me half a million dollars to make sure Lily never became a Hail.”
The doors opened again.
A nurse smiled carefully.
“Mom can come in.”
Sophia immediately moved.
I stayed frozen.
Then she turned.
“Marcus?”
I looked at her.
For two years, this woman had cleaned my home while carrying my brother’s daughter through my kitchen.
And I had never seen it.
“Go,” I said.
“I’ll handle everything else.”
Her expression tightened.
“That’s what Gabriel used to say.”
I stopped.
Sophia looked toward Lily.
“He always thought handling everything meant doing it alone.”
Then she disappeared through the doors.
I stood there with my brother’s name still glowing on the computer screen.
My phone buzzed.
Forty-three congratulatory messages about the Voss acquisition.
The largest deal of my career.
I opened the newest.
From Victor Voss himself.
Congratulations, Marcus. Gabriel would have been proud to see Voss finally become part of the Hail family.
I stared at it.
Then at the doors behind which Gabriel’s three-year-old daughter lay connected to cardiac monitors.
May you like
And for the first time, I wondered whether my $900 million acquisition had not brought my brother’s company home.
Maybe it had brought his killers directly into my hands.
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