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"The Halsted Foundation. The trust."

"I don't know who that is."

He stares at me like I've told him I don't know what blood is.

"Their name is on a plaque outside your office, you ungrateful girl." He laughs and takes a swig of his drink. "Six-thirty in the morning, I get a phone call. Somebody wants to donate a scanner. Three million, no committee, no forms, no six months of begging the board. It was in the building within eleven weeks. Ferris in cardiology still hasn't recovered. It is my whole legacy, and you're telling me you don't know who paid for it."

"Marcus, how long have they been funding us?"

"Oh, years. Six, seven. Long before you."

"How long before me?"

"Before you were anything." He waves it off. "Which reminds me. I'm going to say this because I've had four of these and it's a party, and if you repeat it I'll deny it. Your research post."

"What about my research post?"

"The one you were so worked up about that you made me read your application twice." He leans in and lowers his voice to a level that carries across most of the room. "Between us, there wasn't much of a shortlist."

"There wasn't much of a shortlist," I repeat after him.

"Well, there was a shortlist, we're not savages. But the money came with the post attached, and you were what it was attached to. That's all I'm saying about it, and now I'm going to find Barnes and those blasted Halsted people."

He kisses my cheek.

"I'm very proud of you," he adds. "You did every bit of that yourself."

Then he walks off, and I stand at the window holding a drink I didn't ask for.

Seven years. I was twenty-six seven years ago. I was on nights in a general ward with a lanyard and no idea where the job was leading me. Back then, I had never heard the name Novak said out loud in my life.

I put the glass down.

I give it twenty minutes, because I'm not going to do this in front of the whole party. Twenty minutes of some older woman holding both my forearms and telling me something about her sister's hip. I cannot for the life of me remember her name. Then I'm face to face with one of Laszlo's cousins, who promptly launches into an ecstatic description of a boat. I keep smiling and nodding, even more so when my father comes to speak to me and I can tell he's outside of his comfort zone by now. I will not give him the satisfaction of showing him how betrayed I feel.

It's the longest twenty minutes of my adult life.

At last, I find Laszlo by the door to the back stairs and say, "A word." I don't wait to see if he follows.

He follows down two flights. Of course he follows. I can hear him behind me, unhurried, probably enjoying this, and I want to kill him.

I shut the door and the party disappears. It's just me and him in a cold corridor that smells like formalin and catering crates. Of course I know exactly what's inside the rooms on this floor, so I stand with my back to them because I'd rather face him than think about that.

"The Halsted Foundation is yours."

"Yes," he says.

No hesitation. He doesn't ask what I've heard or who told me.

"Marcus Whitlow thinks I won that post."

"You did win that post."

"Don't you dare say that to me."

"I'm being accurate, which I accept is worse than lying." He leans against the wall like he lives here, which he does. I hate this charade.

"You put money into my hospital." I poke him in the chest with two fingers. His breath catches. Good. Suffer. "A foundation. Scanners, grants, God knows what else."