Chapter 5 - The Janitor’s Shift
While the high-stakes corporate drama brewed inside Room 417, down on the ground floor, Maria Carter was pushing her gray cleaning cart with the squeaky back wheel down the dimly lit corridor of the hospital’s administrative wing.
Maria was tired. Her feet ached inside her worn-out sneakers, and the smell of industrial floor wax had long since settled into the fabric of her blue jumpsuit. Being a night-shift environmental services worker meant she was invisible. People stepped around her cart without looking at her face. Doctors dropped empty coffee cups on her freshly mopped floors without a second thought.
She didn't mind the invisibility most days. It gave her space to think about Lily.
Maria’s chest tightened with a familiar pang of anxiety. She had brought Lily to work today because the local daycare had closed due to a plumbing failure, and she had no one else to leave her with. She had strictly told Lily to stay in the tiny janitor’s breakroom on the third floor, color her pictures, and not touch anything.
She’s a good girl, Maria whispered to herself, wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist. She wouldn't wander off.
Suddenly, the heavy double doors at the end of the hallway swung open with a loud thud.
Three men in expensive tailored suits strode through, talking in urgent, hushed tones. Maria instinctively pulled her cart to the side, pressing her back against the wall to let them pass.
It was Richard Vance, executive vice president of Brooks Technologies, flanked by two corporate attorneys. Richard looked stressed, his tie slightly loosened, his phone pressed firmly against his ear.
"...I don't care what the emergency board notification says," Richard snapped into his phone, his voice echoing off the tile walls. "Push the emergency shareholder vote to midnight. If we file the Janus patents before Nathaniel’s estate executors realize what's happening, the board will legally ratify the transfer of ownership by morning. He's a vegetable! He's not waking up!"
Maria froze. She didn't know much about corporate law, but she knew the name Nathaniel Brooks. He was the man in Room 417. The man her daughter had been talking about for weeks.
“He looks lonely, Mama,” Lily had told her yesterday while eating a peanut butter sandwich in the breakroom. “I sing him songs so he doesn't feel cold.”
Richard and his entourage marched past Maria without even glancing at her, turning the corner toward the private executive elevators that led up to the boardroom.
Maria’s heart hammered against her ribs. Something felt terribly, terribly wrong. She looked down at her cart, then up at the security camera mounted in the corner of the hallway.
Without thinking, she abandoned her mop, grabbed her radio communicator from her belt, and pressed the call button for the third-floor nurse’s station.
"Danielle? Danielle, it's Maria from housekeeping. Please... please pick up."
The radio clicked static for a second before a breathless voice came through the speaker.
“Maria? Oh, thank God. Maria, you need to get up to Room 417 right now. Your daughter... your daughter is currently holding court with a billionaire, a team of lawyers, and a very confused chief of medicine.”
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Maria’s breath caught in her throat. "My... my daughter is in the ICU?!"
“She’s fine!” Danielle laughed nervously over the radio. “In fact, she just saved the entire company. But Maria... you need to get up here. Fast. Because Richard Vance is on his way down to the executive floor, and he has no idea that the man he's trying to rob just woke up.”
