Chapter 1: The Price of a Hospital
Hania Ahmed learned the price of her father’s life’s work at exactly 9:17 p.m.
One hundred and eighty million rupees.
The number sat in the middle of the legal notice like a sentence passed by a judge. It was printed in black ink, folded twice by someone who had not cared that the paper would shake in her hands, and delivered to Ahmed Memorial Hospital with all the warmth of a final warning.
Settle the outstanding amount within fourteen working days, or the bank will begin possession proceedings.
Hania read the line once. Then again. Then a third time, because the human mind was cruel like that. It kept looking for mercy in words that had none.
The office around her was small and tired. Files leaned against one another on the shelves. The ceiling fan clicked every few seconds as if counting down the hospital’s remaining breaths. Through the half-open door, she could hear the emergency ward: a child crying, a nurse calling for gauze, the metal wheels of a stretcher rattling over broken tiles.
Ahmed Memorial was not grand. It had old paint, overworked nurses, and a pharmacy that often gave medicine on credit because turning away the poor had never been part of her father’s character.
For thirty years, Dr. Faisal Ahmed had treated patients who could not pay. He accepted prayers instead of fees, gratitude instead of cheques, and sometimes nothing at all. People called him noble.
The bank called him overdue.
Hania pressed her fingers against her eyes until the numbers blurred behind her eyelids. She was twenty-four, not old enough to feel this exhausted. Yet the weight of the hospital had been sitting on her shoulders for months, growing heavier every time another bill arrived, another donor backed out, another supplier demanded payment before delivery.
A cough sounded from the corridor.
Dr. Ahmed stood outside the office door with one hand against the wall. His white coat hung loose on his shoulders, and his face carried the grey tiredness he kept trying to hide from her.
Dr. Ahmed: “You’re still here?”
Hania slipped the legal notice under a patient file before he could see it.
Hania: “Just finishing the inventory list.”
His gaze moved to the desk. Her father had always been gentle, but never foolish.
Dr. Ahmed: “At nine at night?”
Hania: “The medicine supplier wants updated stock before morning. You should be resting.”
Dr. Ahmed: “Doctors rest after patients stop getting sick.”
Hania: “Abu.”
The single word carried enough warning that he chuckled softly, though the sound broke into another cough. Hania reached for his arm. He let her support him for one second before pride made him straighten.
Dr. Ahmed: “I’m fine.”
Hania: “You are not fine. Your blood pressure was high this morning.”
Dr. Ahmed: “And yours?”
She looked away.
Hania: “Mine is not the patient.”
Dr. Ahmed: “No. You are the one who worries for all of us.”
Something in his voice made her throat tighten. Hania could speak politely while being insulted. She could smile at donors who made promises and never returned calls. But when her father looked at her with gratitude and guilt mixed together, her strength felt like glass.
Before she could answer, a nurse appeared at the end of the corridor.
Nurse: “Doctor sahib, the boy from Bed Six is asking for you.”
Dr. Ahmed turned immediately.
Dr. Ahmed: “I’m coming.”
Hania watched him walk away, one hand pressed briefly to his chest when he thought no one was looking.
The legal notice seemed to burn beneath the patient file.
Fourteen working days. One hundred and eighty million rupees. A hospital full of people who had nowhere else to go.
Her phone rang.
Unknown number.
Hania answered before she could lose courage.
Hania: “Hello?”
Rayyan: “Miss Hania Ahmed?”
The voice was male, calm, and too controlled to belong to anyone calling in panic.
Hania: “Yes.”
Rayyan: “My name is Rayyan Shah.”
Her fingers tightened around the phone.
Everyone in Pakistan knew that name. Rayyan Shah. Eldest grandson of the late Khalid Shah, heir to the Shah Group empire, a man whose face appeared in business magazines beside words like power, discipline, and legacy.
He was also the son of the family Hania had been taught never to trust.
The Shah name lived in the silences that fell whenever her mother was mentioned. It hid behind the locked drawer in her father’s bedroom. It returned every year on the anniversary of the accident, when Abu would close the hospital early and sit alone in the courtyard until dawn.
Hania: “What do you want?”
Rayyan: “I would like to meet you.”
Hania: “I don’t meet strangers at night.”
Rayyan: “I’m not a stranger.”
Hania: “No. You’re worse.”
Silence.
Most men of his position would have taken offense. Rayyan Shah only breathed once, slow and measured.
Rayyan: “Your hospital received a bank notice today.”
Hania went still.
Hania: “How do you know that?”
Rayyan: “Because Shah Capital purchased a portion of the hospital’s debt six months ago.”
Her blood ran cold.
Hania: “Your company owns our debt?”
Rayyan: “Not all of it.”
Hania: “That is supposed to comfort me?”
Rayyan: “It is supposed to explain why I am calling.”
She stood so quickly her chair scraped against the floor.
Hania: “If this is a threat, Mr. Shah, send it through your lawyers like everyone else.”
Rayyan: “It is not a threat.”
Hania: “Then what is it?”
Rayyan: “An offer.”
Hania laughed once, without humor.
Hania: “Your family has taken enough from mine.”
Rayyan: “You don’t know my family.”
Hania: “I know their name.”
Rayyan: “Names are not evidence.”
Hania: “And money is not innocence.”
This time the pause lasted longer.
Rayyan: “I will clear every rupee of Ahmed Memorial Hospital’s urgent debt.”
The words landed with such force that Hania forgot how to breathe.
Hania: “Why?”
Rayyan: “Because I need something from you.”
Hania: “And what exactly do you need?”
Rayyan: “A wife.”
For a moment, she thought she had misheard.
Hania: “Excuse me?”
Rayyan: “My grandfather’s will requires certain conditions to be fulfilled before the annual board review. My public image has become a matter of business stability. I need a respectable marriage before the review.”
Hania: “Then marry someone from your own world.”
Rayyan: “Women from my world come with families who want shares, influence, and lifelong access.”
Hania: “And what do I come with?”
Rayyan: “A hospital in debt.”
The cruelty of it struck clean and precise.
Hania: “You think desperation makes me cheaper?”
Rayyan: “No. I think desperation makes people honest about what they need.”
Hania turned toward the corridor. Through the glass partition, she could see her father leaning over a young patient’s bed, one hand resting gently on the boy’s shoulder. Even exhausted, even sick, he gave people hope as if hope did not cost him pieces of himself.
A memory rose before she could stop it: her father counting coins at the kitchen table when she was twelve, pretending the electricity bill was a game of numbers. Her mother had been gone four years by then, but the house still carried her absence like furniture no one dared move. Abu had never cried in front of Hania. He had simply worked more hours, smiled less, and turned Ahmed Memorial into the one thing grief had not managed to steal from him.
If the hospital closed, it would not only be a building lost to the bank. It would be the last place where her father still looked whole.
A dangerous thought moved through Hania. If she married Rayyan Shah, she would enter his home. She would see the rooms, records, and conversations her father had spent sixteen years avoiding. The truth about her mother had remained outside her reach. Rayyan had just opened the gate himself.
Hania: “Where?”
Rayyan: “Where what?”
Hania: “The meeting.”
Rayyan: “My office. Tomorrow morning. Ten.”
Hania: “No. Come here. Seven a.m. Before rounds.”
Rayyan: “You are giving me an appointment?”
Hania: “You called me, Mr. Shah.”
Another silence.
Rayyan: “Seven, then.”
Hania ended the call with the legal notice still waiting beneath the file.
Then she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and took out the only photograph she kept hidden there.
Her mother smiled from the faded picture, young and beautiful, one hand resting on Hania’s toddler shoulder. The corner of the photograph had been torn years ago, removing whoever had stood beside them.
Hania turned it over.
On the back, in her father’s handwriting, were two words she had memorized long before she understood them.
Ask Shah.
Tomorrow morning, Rayyan Shah would walk into her hospital with a marriage agreement and a solution to her father’s debt.
He thought she was desperate.
He was right.
But desperation had many faces.
Some begged. Some surrendered.
Hania folded the legal notice, placed her mother’s photograph inside it, and locked both in her drawer.
Hania: “Let’s see what your family is hiding.”
____________ TWC_____________
