Chapter 6
He hadn't been near us for the first part of the exchange, caught in conversation by the stage, but I watched his expression change from across the room the instant he registered what was happening, the way a man's face changes when he sees a house he built starting to catch fire. He reached us just as Preston lifted his glass a second time.
"Preston." Jacob's voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. The atrium had a way of going quiet around him that had nothing to do with volume and everything to do with the fact that his name was on the building's donor wall twice over. "Say the next sentence carefully."
Preston, emboldened by an audience and probably two glasses of scotch, didn't take the warning. "I'm just explaining to your little nurse here how conflict of interest policies work, brother. Someone should, before the board finds out you've been funding her floor out of your personal account and calls it something other than charity."
"I funded cardiac monitors for a floor that hasn't had updated equipment since 2016," Jacob said, "three weeks before I ever knew Emma Castellano's name, using a foundation grant that went through full board review in March, which you personally voted to approve, Preston, because you wanted your name on the plaque next to mine." He let that sit in the air for a second before continuing. "Emma didn't ask me for anything. Emma didn't know about the donation until you just announced it to a room full of our biggest contributors. What she did do was spend six years on a cardiac floor holding the hands of people who were dying, including our grandmother, without once asking what my last name was."
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The room had gone completely still now, the kind of stillness that makes a person's own heartbeat sound loud in their ears.
"She fell asleep in the back of my car," Jacob continued, turning slightly so his voice reached every corner of that atrium, "because she'd just finished a twenty-four-hour shift saving lives in this exact building, and my driver's SUV happened to look like her rideshare in the rain. I sat beside her for eleven minutes while she slept, because I didn't have the heart to wake a woman who looked that tired, and I have thought about that eleven minutes nearly every day since, not because it was funny, though God knows it was, but because it was the first time in years I met someone in this circle who had absolutely no idea who I was and treated me like a person anyway." He looked at Preston, and whatever warmth had been in his voice a moment earlier disappeared entirely. "You just stood in front of our family's biggest donors and humiliated a woman who has spent her entire career doing more good in one shift than you've done with your trust fund in a decade. That's not a conflict of interest, Preston. That's the most honest thing anyone in this room has said all night, and you just tried to turn it into a scandal to make yourself feel important."
