“Samuel Roth.”
“My name is Natalie Mercer Holloway.”
Silence.
Then I heard him exhale.
“Thomas’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
“I wondered if you would ever call.”
My grip tightened around the phone.
“What did my father do?”
“That is not a conversation for the phone.”
“I just got fired from Sterling Memorial.”
Another silence.
This one longer.
“By Grant?”
“Yes.”
Samuel’s voice changed.
“Then come to my office tomorrow morning. And Natalie?”
“Yes?”
“Do not sign your termination paperwork.”
“Why?”
“Because your husband may have just fired the controlling owner of Sterling Memorial Hospital.”
I barely slept.
Grant didn’t come home.
At 11:43 p.m., he sent another text saying he needed “space.”
Our eight-year-old daughter, Lily, asked why Daddy wasn’t there for dinner.
I told her he was working.
I hated myself for lying.
The next morning, I dropped Lily at school and drove downtown.
Samuel Roth’s office occupied the top floor of a historic brick building overlooking Boston Harbor.
He was seventy-two, silver-haired, soft-spoken, and nothing like the aggressive attorney I had imagined.
He shook my hand.
“You look like Thomas.”
“People usually say my mother.”
“They’re wrong.”
He led me into a conference room.
Three folders were waiting.
Samuel opened the first.
“Your father never worked merely as an accountant.”
“He told me he handled acquisitions.”
“He did. At first.”
Samuel slid several documents toward me.
“Over thirty years, Thomas acquired interests in medical offices, outpatient clinics, laboratory facilities, rehabilitation centers, and hospital real estate. Most were held through separate corporate entities.”
I stared at pages filled with names I had never seen.
“Why hide this?”
“Your father grew up extremely poor. His own family nearly lost everything twice because of relatives who treated money like entitlement. Once he became wealthy, he developed an obsession with knowing who cared about him and who cared about what he owned.”
“That sounds like Dad.”
Samuel smiled.
“Very much so.”
Then he opened the second folder.
At the top was the name:
Mercer Atlantic Health Group.
My eyes stopped on the next page.
Sterling Memorial Hospital.
I looked up.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Mercer Atlantic owns sixty-eight percent of Sterling’s holding company.”
I stared at him.
“My father owned Sterling?”
“He controlled it.”
“And now?”
“You are the sole successor beneficiary.”
For several seconds, I couldn’t speak.
Then I started laughing.
Not because anything was funny.
Because the alternative was crying.
“Grant fired me from my own hospital.”
Samuel leaned back.
“Technically, hospital employees can still be terminated under standard employment procedures regardless of ownership. But the amusing part is that Grant has spent the past seven years trying to impress the Mercer Atlantic board without realizing he sleeps beside the beneficiary who controls it.”
