F rom her office’s vantage point in the Hildon Building, Tamara Price could have looked down into the heart of Santurce, San Juan’s most populated barrio. If Miss Price were to spin her chair around, she’d have a perfect view of the Bay of San Juan, and all the swollen cruise ships waddling into port near the historic district, spilling out passengers greased up with money, oblivious of small, sick people like Gabriela’s daughter, Flor. From Miss Price’s lofty office, San Juan was as clinical and orderly as one desired. At this height, there were no street vendors on sidewalks, roasting in the Puerto Rican sun as they fried up mashed plantains for mofongo and prayed to catch tourists’ eyes and a few dollars. None of the buildings below moldered or stunk of mildew after Hurricane Maria had blown the island down to its skin.

No one was lame. No one was sick. No one was poor, except through their own failures of effort. People were not jammed into the poorhouse randomly. Misfortune was a compass, always pointed in the right direction.

On the eighth floor of the Hildon Pharmaceutical building, one could look down and see a perfect world of majestic white sail boats, gleaming black cars, and people with money to burn. To be Gabriela Ramos, sitting in front of Miss Price, was to be inspired by a young woman’s capacity for self-determination, wits, and above all else, hard work—the fuel for all fortunes.

If Gabriela had only had the focus and the guts when she was younger—if she hadn’t chased boys as a young teenager and sniffed out alcohol in her mother’s hutch the way other kids hunted for Christmas presents, maybe she wouldn’t have had to come to her boss, begging for charity.

Even before showing up at this meeting—if asking for a handout could be considered a meeting—Gabriela knew her place in relation to Miss Price—six floors down and two promotions up. A supervisor’s office held fast to the rung between Miss Price, newly hired vice president of special projects at Hildon, and Gabriela Ramos, Team Lead for Event Planning.

The two of them were of an age. Gabriela was almost thirty. And regardless of what her corporate bio might say, Tamara Price was only thirty on a bad day. Her eyebrows perfectly groomed, her skin radiant under a dusting of foundation, she looked closer to twenty-four, and would probably age at half the rate of Gabriela.

A good face to have for a company, and not only on account of her God-given, wide, clear eyes, and dark, silky hair that always fell just the right way over her shoulders, or her fetching smile that nabbed everyone, or that she was a swatch of “diversity” for a company with a board overwhelmingly stuffed with balding white men.

No, Miss Price was also as sharp as they came. She had an unparalleled knack for pitching ideas to the rest of Hildon’s board, perceptively guessing sticking points and objections in the planning phases for each new project, when team leads like Gabriela did dry runs of their presentations on new ideas in Tamara’s office.

And Miss Price’s eye for talent was unmatched. Gabriela had worked under three different VPs over her six years with Hildon. None of them hired the way Miss Price did. None saw the potential in an applicant’s portfolio as clearly, or seemed to understand how personalities fit together on a team, or how best to motivate them to meet the teams’ goals.

Meeting goals might’ve been Miss Price’s strongest talent. She always got results.

Put it all together, and you had what seemed an inevitability; one of the youngest vice presidents to ever serve on a major pharmaceutical company’s board. So, if anyone, short of the Lord God, could help wiggle Gabriela’s daughter into the Anthradone trial, it was Miss Price. After all, the trial was being run by a contractor on Hildon Pharmaceuticals’ behalf. An up-and-coming VP would have to have some sway.

“I just don’t see how I can do anything to help,” Miss Price said. “I’m sorry—I truly am, Gabriela—but I’m simply not in the position to interfere with a trial.”

Miss Price’s eyes pulled Gabriela’s attention from the high windows beyond her. So clear and young, and looking into them brought a pang of knowing Gabriela would miss a young woman’s will and energy. All that determination, and earnest seeking.

No crying. No whining. No feeling sorry for yourself. Lord, Jesus, grant me the strength to endure in Your name.

“You understand, don’t you?” Miss Price asked. “My hands are tied. You’ve been like family to me, and to everyone else at Hildon, Gabriela. I, of course, want the best for your daughter, but using my position to do what you’ve asked calls into question our entire organization—it’s problematic. ”

Gabriela swallowed the lump down her throat and blinked her eyes clear.

“I wouldn’t want to cause a problem.”

“It would compromise the nature of the scientific study,” Miss Price said. “A drug like Anthradone, with all its promises and potential to cure such a rare disease without any other effective treatments—think of how many people have waited for that. Any outside interference could set it back years, and meanwhile, the people who need it won’t get it.”

Miss Price spoke like a grief counselor. Soft, but firm, giving measured doses of bitter, jagged reality. The world couldn’t stop for one little girl.

“There’s also a personal risk for you, Gabriela. Even if someone were to know that we discussed this, it would be a serious black mark on your record.”

Gabriela’s spine stiffened. Her fingernails prodded at the heels of her palms. Lord save me from myself. Don’t let me lose this job. Please, if it is Your design.

“Hildon would have to let you go, and you’d have a difficult time getting work in the pharmaceutical industry ever again—no one wants to risk undermining science. Think of all the capital we have to invest on an orphan treatment like Anthradone. Research is our biggest exposure to risk, and to open ourselves up to further exposure because an employee pushed too hard from the inside—the margins are already slim, and the consumer base is going to be infinitesimal.”

“No—I didn’t mean to—”

Miss Price held up a perfectly manicured hand.

“I know you didn’t—you’re a good mother trying to do everything possible for her daughter. Who among us wouldn’t do that? That’s why I’ll keep our meeting off the record. That, and respect for the work that you’ve done here. We watch out for our Hildon family members.”

Like family. It felt good to be protected by someone who cared. Even if Miss Price didn’t have any kids.

“We can’t taint the blind nature of a drug trial,” she said. “You understand.”

“I understand. Of course.”

Miss Price smiled sadly from the other side of her big desk. She folded her hands, only to spread them again.

“I’ll do anything else I can to help you,” she said. “I can dig up referrals for another pediatric oncologist—we can relocate you to any major city in the continental U.S., any city with an outstanding children’s hospital—but I can’t meddle in a study. It’s unethical.”

Gabriela took Miss Price’s words as well as any mother in her position could have. A new doctor wouldn’t do it. Moving across the country with a daughter as sick as Flor might kill her. Her fingernails bit into her palms again, but she didn’t make a scene. She wouldn’t let herself cry in front of her boss. She had a good job, even if her paycheck didn’t cover all of Flor’s bills; she was already paid in the eighty-fifth percentile of people who’d held her position for the same number of years she had.

“Gabriela, honey, you seem stressed,” Miss Price said. “Do you need to take a personal day?”

“I’m out of vacation days.” Gabriela set her eyes on her feet. The tips of her shoes were dulled with age—something that never would’ve happened to her four years ago.

“Then you have my permission to take unpaid days,” Miss Price offered. “I’ll clear it with HR.” She picked up the receiver on her desk phone and started to bring it to her ear.

Unpaid vacation? No, that was worse than working—without work to distract her, she wouldn’t be able to focus on anything. Not with the knowledge of crippling debt creeping closer and closer by the hour while Gabriela did what? Slept on the couch next to Flor’s bed and watched TV?

“That’s all right.” Gabriela forced herself to look Miss Price in the eyes. She flexed her cheeks, jaw, and every other muscle in her face until her lips formed something resembling a grin.

She pushed herself up from Miss Price’s Italian leather couch.

“I’ll be just fine, Miss Price.” She held the smile. “I appreciate you watching out for me.”

Miss Price slowly hung up the phone, cheerfully meeting Gabriela’s smile with one of her own.

“Thank you for sparing your time,” Gabriela said.

“Sparing my time? Gabbie, we know each other better than that.”

Gabriela forced a smile. If she could’ve seen her own face, she was sure she would’ve seen the smile as a cold, twitching thing, a fish trying to gulp down its last few breaths.

“Try your best to take it easy, honey,” Tamara said. “Everything you are, your clothes, your smile, the way you wait in line at the grocery store—your whole person reflects on the company.”

“It does.” Then, Gabriela turned to the door, took the lever handle in her stinging hand, and twisted it until the latch let go. She scurried out of Miss Price’s office before her whole person reflected the thoughts and feelings, she felt bubbling up inside.

Gabriela strode past the secretary, Luis, without giving him a first look. She felt his eyes on her as she cut toward the small hallway beyond his desk. She felt him watching, taking pity on her, tasting the despair that must’ve been peeling off her skin until she moved right, into an intersecting hallway, and ran for the nearest bathroom.

Inside the first stall, she gave herself five minutes. Not an extra second would be wasted on tears, on feeling bad for herself or for Flor. There were precious few seconds left.

When the timer beeped on Gabriela’s phone, she unspooled a wad of toilet paper. She blotted the running mascara as best she could. A quick prayer to the Lord for strength and guidance, then, she emerged from the bathroom stall, and caught an eyeful of herself in the long mirror over the vanity.

Terrible. Awful. Unpresentable, uneven smudges of mascara under her eyes—it was no wonder she hadn’t climbed Hildon. She pulled a paper towel from the dispenser, wet it, and scrubbed.

Before long, all the mascara was erased. She’d left her makeup in her purse at her desk. If she wanted to fix it, she’d have to emerge from this secluded bathroom and face the world again.

Outside, the bathroom, the halls murmured with distant phone calls and the hollow clicks of computer keyboards. No one noticed her. No one cared. They had their own problems.

She wound through the halls, reached the elevator bank, and rode it down six floors.

As soon as the doors opened, the stench of burnt coffee hit her nose, and the chatter of people taking their first fifteen of the day assaulted her ears.

She continued down the main hall of the second floor, toward her team office—the tiny room she shared with her two subordinates, Paul and Martina—a space far too small for two people, let alone three. Thank God the new campus would be opening in a week, sparing them all another summer of swimming through each other’s body heat for nine hours a day.

What did body heat matter to Gabriela now? Would Flor still be with her next summer? Would she comment on the sweat stains around the collars of her mother’s shirts when the laundry came back?

Or would she be gone?

Gabriela understood why putting Flor in the trial would be frowned upon. But didn’t she have Li-Fraumeni Syndrome too? Which was more unethical? Picking out a single person to add into a trial that would probably include hundreds of people? Or letting a little girl die when you had a cure available, because innovation was hard and drug development cost too much money to risk?

Year-end balance sheets meant everything to Hildon. The bottom line must hold. Did their cures pay enough to cover advertising? How about construction of the new campus, and the new hires’ salaries? Was the income stream fat enough to satisfy the stockholders’ profit margin? And what about compensation packages? Lord help them if they forgot about compensation packages.

Income was soft this year? Buy up another lab. Figure out a new way to use an old drug—and if you could use that old drug to treat an orphaned disease like Li-Fraumeni, you’d go home with a two percent raise. Salami-slice every formula and compound until you had customers using antibiotics to treat gout. Did it matter if Flor were in one trial? Would Hildon’s vast corporate web tear from its supports and drop them all into freefall?

No, it wouldn’t. But Gabriela needed her job. And, in any case, Miss Price wouldn’t help her. Who else could she beg for help?

Nobody.

When she turned into the open door of her team’s office, she found Paul hunched over his computer, their team’s budgetary spreadsheet open on his screen.

“How’d the meeting go with Price?” His office chair groaned as he looked back at her.

“Fine,” Gabriela said. She dug in her purse, looking for her mascara.

“What did she say about getting that banner made for the kickoff celebration?”

Banner? What banner? Who cared about a banner?

“Gabbie?”

Right. The banner. Her cover story.

“It didn’t come up.” She found the black tube of mascara tucked in an out-of-the-way pocket, separate from her hot pink makeup bag. Flor must’ve been playing in her purse again.

“You said you were going to ask her.”

This wasn’t going away. She sighed, her hands flat on her desk, and then she turned around to face him. He didn’t know about Flor. None of her subordinates did.

“Call the printing company and see if you can get it put on our account. They’ll work with us.”

Paul crossed his arms. “What’s their name again?” he asked.

“I’ll find it.” Gabriela turned back to her desk, unlocked her computer, then opened the company directory system. Numbers for all of Hildon’s vendors, contractors, and researchers crawled up the screen as she scrolled to the entry for M&G Print Services, but a moment after seeing it, she froze.

The next entry sent a flutter up her spine. Markel Research Group—the Anthradone trials.

Gabriela looked over her shoulder, and saw Paul with his back turned, grumbling, his nose six inches from his computer monitor as he pored over whether the napkins at the kickoff celebration should be aqua or turquoise.

She clicked the entry for Markel Research, scrolled down and snatched a piece of paper off a notepad she kept next to her keyboard. After scribbling down the office number, she backed out of the Markel entry, clicked M&G Print Services, took that number down, then gave it to Paul.

A half second later, she was three paces down the hall, fighting every urge to sprint.

Then she slowed as her thoughts coiled around a new problem: where was she going to call Dr. Markel without anyone noticing? She couldn’t go back to her car. She’d have to swipe her ID badge at the door, and if someone got suspicious a week or a month or a year from now, she’d have to explain why she took an irregular trip out to her car that morning. No empty offices here—they were behind schedule on the new building, and all the new hires had been stuffed in. Bathrooms were right out. Too many people coming or going.

She opted for a particular broom closet—one crammed in a corner on the opposite end of the building, near an IT services storeroom.

The janitors worked nights, so it was a perfect place.

When Gabriela turned into the hall on the southwest side of the building, she found it empty, the lights off.

Perfect.

Inside, the closet was plenty big for someone as small as Gabriela. It smelled of bleach, latex and dust—something that normally bothered her, but not now.

Her left hand clutched the note with Markel’s number. Her right hand held fast to her phone. She’d kept the broom closet light off, only using the light from her phone’s screen to illuminate the note.

She tapped in the numbers, her thumbs trembling. Once she had the number in, ready to dial, she paused and prayed. Let the prayers guide her through. Then, she hit the button.

She was barely able to hold onto the phone as she pressed it to her ear.

It rang once.

“Markel Research Group, how may I direct your call?” a woman’s voice answered.

Gabriela went numb. She hadn’t thought about what she was going to say, much less who she was going to talk to. Should she ask for a supervisor? Maybe the person in charge of planning trials? But what would she do then? Ask them for a spot for Flor Ramos, the girl they’d rejected already? What in the hell had possessed her to zip off on her own and do this? How small she was, how insignificant. No one would listen to her.

“Hello?” the receptionist said.

The veins in Gabriela’s ears pounded. She could barely hear herself think. Now or never. Do it or leave yourself wailing at Flor’s funeral about how you had a treatment so close, you were only a few words away from getting it to her. Live with that the rest of your wretched life.

She had to say something.

“Dr. Markel, please.” Right to the top. A big gamble, one she knew could backfire, and likely would. If Markel were the kind of man who micromanaged everything, he’d sniff her out as a liar before she could say much at all. But if he were too detached from his own company, she’d be wasting her time.

There has to be a way, oh Lord. Shepherd me.

“May I ask who is calling?” the receptionist said.

“Yes, my name is Flor Gabriela—” the only two names that came to her “—and I’m calling from the Associated Press wire service. I wondered if Dr. Markel wouldn’t mind telling me about a new cancer drug, I’ve heard he’s working on? Anthradone, is it? Am I pronouncing that correctly?”

Gabriela braced for the receptionist’s answer. Her hands had gone back to trembling. She noticed everything now—her own breathing, the faint thud of footsteps on the floor above her, and the worrying silence on the other end of her phone call.

“Dr. Markel is currently not in the office,” the receptionist finally said. “May I take a message for you, Miss Gabriela?”

Without meaning to, Gabriela breathed a sigh of relief.

“He’s not?” She asked. “Is there another way I can reach him?”

“I’d be happy to take a message for you, ma’am.”

“Oh, no, that’s fine. I’ll talk to someone else.” Gabriela ended the call.

What the hell was she doing? Impersonating someone to talk to a doctor she didn’t even know—one that she had a truly clear conflict of interest with? And what if she did get Dr. Markel on the line? What then? Did she sob into the phone and beg him to bend the rules and put Flor into the Anthradone trial?

Another prayer came.

Gabriela stared into the darkened closet. She saw vague shapes in the shadows. She saw a future without light, a barren, gray smear. She saw herself barefoot and shivering, damned to wander through a wilderness of dead plants, dried riverbeds and sulfur, the shimmering heat, the sleepless nights of mourning. A lake of fire.

Her mind pictured Flor, a preschooler, squeezing her thick, black hair together with a rubber band, like a farmer wrestling with a bundle of hay. She tamed her hair, then put a tiara on her head and twirled in the living room of their old house, showing off the ballet steps she’d learned.

Six years ago. Half her daughter’s life. She was so full of energy before Li-Fraumeni, when the worst illness Flor ever had was a string of stomach aches that a doctor found out was chronic indigestion caused by a bacterial migration from her gut.

All it took to cure that was a single treatment of Poraxim—another of Hildon’s products, which they were happy to sell for a couple hundred dollars.

No one batted an eye about giving her that medicine. No one had yanked it away or told Gabriela it would be unethical to use it to heal her daughter.

Now it was all different.

Gabriela wiped her hand on her skirt, then she opened the closet door and checked the hall. Just as she was about to step out, her phone rang in her hand.

She jumped. Somebody was going to hear it. She shut the closet door and hit the button to silence the phone.

On the screen was a number she didn’t know. It wasn’t saved in her phone, and it wasn’t the number for Markel Research—it was a couple digits off.

She let her phone vibrate in her hand until it stopped, and the screen went dark. Then, she switched her phone over to silent.

As she started to open the closet door, the phone buzzed again.

Same number.

Gabriela couldn’t answer. She knew it had to be someone from Markel. Probably an attorney or a fraud officer—she didn’t want to face up to what she’d done. How could she explain herself? More lies? She wouldn’t be able to keep track of them all.

But when the phone started rattling at her a third time, Gabriela knew this wasn’t going away. She had to face whomever it was head on, offer a sincere apology without elaborating too much, and hope that would be enough.

She answered, bringing the phone to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Is this the reporter from the AP?” A man’s voice asked. Not the receptionist.

Her heart jumped into her throat.

“Who is this?” Gabriela asked. “How did you get my number?”

“You called my lab and asked for me.”

Impossible.

“Dr. Markel?”

“Yes.” He was whispering into the phone. Gabriela pictured a man in a dark closet hiding, like her. “You stirred up my receptionist, Angela,” he said. “What did you tell her?”

“Just that I wanted to talk to you about Anthradone,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s what upset her, I hung up on her.”

The call went silent for a handful of seconds. Long enough for Gabriela to consider telling him the truth.

“Dr. Markel, I—”

“I can tell you everything you’ll want to know about Anthradone, but we can’t do it over the phone. How quickly can you come to my house?”

Now wasn’t the time for the truth.

If Gabriela could get into the same room as Dr. Markel, she knew she had a better chance of getting him to accept Flor into the Anthradone trial. He couldn’t turn away someone in need—not face-to-face.

“Where do you live?”

“West of San Juan,” he answered. “I’m on the coast, north of Manati.”

Gabriela wanted to leave now, but she couldn’t. Not after telling Miss Price she couldn’t take a personal day. And she’d have to arrange for Flor’s nurse to stay a couple of hours later than usual.

“This evening,” she said. “Around 6 p.m.”

“Then that’ll have to do,” he said. “Am I calling you on a cell phone number?”

“Yes.”

Silence followed her answer.

Gabriela looked at her phone—of all the times to get disconnected.

She started to re-dial the doctor when an alert to a text message appeared. She tapped it and a message from Dr. Markel’s number came on the screen—his home address.