Drew blew across his steaming cup of black coffee before taking a sip. He felt a breeze whiz past his head as Samantha Gomez’s pacing increased. She and the rest of the team had been camped out in his apartment since seven this morning. They’d entered the phase of an audit when everything feels out of sorts yet as if it is all coming together at the same time. There was no getting around the intensity of this point in the process.
Yet his mind repeatedly wandered to the condo listings his Realtor had forwarded him last night. All he could think about was finding a place to live that would keep him as close as possible to London.
Focus.
He could not allow any distractions to knock him off his game, even one as tempting as London. He and his team had poured hundreds of hours into examining Travis County Hospital’s finances and operations. Now they were barreling toward the finish line and praying for no stumbling blocks during this final stretch. He owed them his full attention.
“Who’s running the numbers on the recommended equipment purchases for the ortho lab?” Samantha asked.
Drew reached for his iPad and pulled up the spreadsheet he’d received via email this morning. He held it aloft.
“Here you go,” he said.
Samantha took the iPad from his hand and continued her pacing.
“Calm down,” Drew said over his shoulder. “You always get like this toward the end of a project, but there’s no need to worry, Sam. The numbers tell the story, and the story is a good one.”
“I know that we’ve done good work here,” she said. “But I can’t help being nervous. It’s just my nature, okay? I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“Stop inviting trouble.” Drew caught her arm, putting a halt to her frenetic pacing. “This team has worked its ass off for the past month. Travis County Hospital was on the verge of being sold, and with the recommendations we’re making, not only will they be able to function as the low-cost health-care provider this area needs, but they’ll be able to provide even better services for the entire community. That’s something to be proud of.”
If even one family could be spared the heartache of losing a loved one due to a late diagnosis or inadequate care, his hard work here would have been worth it. It would be a small tribute to his mother’s legacy. If he could save someone else from a similar fate, her dying so young wouldn’t be in vain.
“What the fuck!”
All eyes turned to Josh Hall, who stared intently at his computer with a look of horrified astonishment.
“Oh goodness,” Samantha said. “Is it the other shoe dropping?”
“More like the other Timberland boot,” he said. “And it’s dropping right on our necks.”
Drew pushed back from the table. “What’s the matter?” he asked as he rounded Josh’s seat and looked at his laptop.
Josh set two copies of the document to print before closing out the dialog box, and then he pointed at the text on the screen.
“Stevens v. Travis County Hospital. Specifically, Dr. Frederick Coleman and Travis County Hospital.” He lifted the documents from the printer bed, handing one to Drew and the other to Sam. “From what I can gather, the hospital settled a malpractice suit with the widower of Abigail Stevens, who died while under Dr. Coleman’s care two years ago. There have been a few legal hang-ups, but the payment is coming due to the tune of nearly five million dollars.”
“What!” Drew flipped through the pages.
“Oh, God,” Samantha said. “This is why I’m always so afraid to hope. I’d rather set myself up for disappointment, because it always comes.”
Drew skimmed the court document, trepidation amassing in his gut. This was more than just bad. This was catastrophic. Based on Trident’s calculations, the most the hospital could absorb, even with malpractice insurance paying the lion’s share, was a half million. And that was cutting it extremely close.
“But we’ve been in constant communication with Legal,” Drew said. “Why would they keep this from us!”
“Because it makes Coleman look bad,” Josh said. “He probably ordered that everything be kept under wraps, even away from other hospital administrators. This is the type of stuff that you hide from as many people as possible if you want to maintain your position of power.”
“I could tell that guy was a prick from the first day we arrived,” Samantha said.
“I don’t care that he’s a prick,” Drew said. “I care that the powers that be in this hospital intentionally misled us. They had to have known that Trident could not conduct a clean audit without this information.”
“None of this is our fault,” Josh pointed out. “Our contract states that clients are to disclose all known financial obligations, both current and future. We can’t be held liable if they intentionally kept this from us.”
Drew wasn’t worried about Trident’s liability. They’d run the most complete audit possible based on the information provided to them. His concern was grounded in what this new detail meant for the recommendations his team had compiled for the hospital’s board of directors. One recommendation in particular.
Samantha put voice to his worrisome thoughts.
“This blows up everything,” she said, tossing the document onto the table and resuming her pacing. “We were already working on a razor-thin margin. A malpractice payout also means allocating more money toward insurance for the next fiscal year. Say goodbye to the new employee day care center. There’s no way County can fund that now.”
“The list of things County can no longer fund is longer than the list of what they can,” Josh said. “We’ll have to reassess every single dollar now.”
And in that reassessment, the fifty thousand dollars they’d estimated in order to get everything London needed for her sensory room would never fly. They wouldn’t even be able to do a scaled-down version.
There was only one solution: Drew would pay for it.
He’d offered to pay for the sensory room before. From the moment he realized just how important it was to London, Drew knew in his heart that he would do whatever he could to make it happen. He could make the donation in his mother’s name, or maybe he could ask London if she had a patient she’d lost in the past whom she had been particularly close to. The sensory room could be a memorial to whomever she chose. It was the easiest solution.
But was it the smartest?
He dragged his palm down his face and sucked in a deep breath in an effort to curb his frustration. He knew better than most that throwing money at a situation wasn’t always the best solution.
Even if he specified what the donation was intended for, the acceptance and subsequent distribution of monetary gifts would still have to go through the hospital board’s approval process. They could choose to reject his gift outright if they didn’t agree with the strings he attached to it. Given the way they’d covered up Coleman’s malpractice suit, Drew wouldn’t put it past them to do just that.
The board’s opinion was one thing, but they also had to consider the public’s opinion. If it turned out that there wasn’t enough money to fund some of the more urgent needs of the hospital, there was no way he could justify a donation being made to finance what many would consider to be his girlfriend’s pet project. Not when they could potentially face cuts to basic services that were used by the majority of patients.
Drew couldn’t think of a PR firm in the country that could put the kind of spin on this that they would need in order to pull it off.
Fucking Coleman.
That son of a bitch was going to cost London her sensory room after all.