Chapter 3 - The Verdict of Dr. Brandt
It was nearly 3:00 a.m. when Camilo pulled out his private encrypted burner phone and dialed Helena Brandt—a brilliant, fiercely independent trauma physician who operated a private underground clinic in the West Loop and whom Camilo contacted only when circumstances involved severe violence or extreme emergency.
She arrived at the estate approximately forty minutes later, stepping out of the rain with a worn black medical bag in hand, her expression tight and professional.
Dr. Brandt didn't ask questions about why she was treating a domestic servant in a billionaire’s basement at three in the morning. She simply unlatched her bag, pulled on a pair of sterile latex gloves, and gently examined Joanna’s mutilated hands, slowly and meticulously peeling away the unsanitary packing tape from the cracked, weeping skin.
Joanna winced, biting back a cry as raw flesh was exposed to the cool basement air. She could not fully straighten her index fingers, nor could she close either hand into a proper fist. She reported a complete loss of sensation in three fingertips on her right hand, noting quietly that she hadn't been able to feel heat or cold in them since June.
Dr. Brandt’s hands froze over Joanna’s wrist. She looked up sharply. “June?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you continued working through the summer and autumn with active nerve death?”
“I had to pay the nursing home, Dr. Brandt,” Joanna whispered, her voice cracking.
The physician stood up straight, letting out a heavy, disgusted sigh. She diagnosed severe, chronic tenosynovitis in both hands—severe inflammation of the tendon sheaths brought on by relentless, repetitive mechanical labor without rest. The fingertip numbness was advanced, irreversible nerve damage, almost certainly catalyzed and accelerated by repeated, unprotected exposure to industrial bleaching agents and caustic commercial detergents at the laundry.
Dr. Brandt had treated gunshot wounds, cartel mutilations, and industrial accidents for twenty-two years in the roughest sectors of Chicago. She looked down at Joanna’s mangled hands, then turned her cold, furious eyes directly onto Camilo.
“These are the hands of someone doing the brutal physical work of three grown men,” Dr. Brandt said, her voice dripping with suppressed venom. “And this is your house, Marquetti.”
Camilo stood silently in the corner of the room, his arms crossed over his chest, his face carved from dark granite. He said nothing in his defense.
Dr. Brandt turned back to Joanna and delivered the clinical reality without sugarcoating it. If Joanna stopped all manual labor immediately—cold turkey—and underwent rigorous medical intervention involving custom orthopedic splinting, anti-inflammatory pharmacology, and intensive physical therapy, her hands might recover to roughly eighty-five percent functionality over six to nine months. She might, eventually, be able to close her fingers, grip coffee mugs, and button her own shirts.
However, if she kept working—even if she pushed through the pain for just a few more weeks—the nerve necrosis would become complete and permanent. Her hands would curl into useless, claw-like deformities for the rest of her life.
Dr. Brandt paused, waiting for the devastating news to sink in.
Joanna’s very first question, however, completely shattered the physician’s expectations. It wasn't about whether she would heal. It wasn't about the pain.
“How long would I have to stop working?” Joanna asked, her voice deadly serious.
“At least six months of absolute rest,” Dr. Brandt stated firmly. “Zero lifting, zero scrubbing, zero industrial exposure.”
Joanna slowly shook her head, a quiet look of absolute resignation washing over her face. “I can't do that.”
She immediately began calculating aloud, explaining the logistics of Eileen’s memory-care payments. She revealed that she had twice formally applied to the state for emergency medical assistance and subsidized care grants. The first bureaucratic application had been ruthlessly denied because a single proof-of-income tax document was supposedly missing from the packet, even though Joanna had mailed it certified. The second application was summarily rejected because her paperwork arrived three days past the arbitrary deadline printed in the municipal notice—a notice that had taken six days to reach her mail slot in the first place.
She had called the caseworkers repeatedly. She had been bounced from department to department, trapped in an endless labyrinth of automated phone trees and indifferent bureaucrats.
No one resolved it. No one cared.
If she missed even a single month’s payment of $2,400, Eileen would be evicted from the Evanston facility and transferred to a state-run geriatric ward notorious for neglect.
At the end of her explanation, Joanna looked up at the two wealthy, powerful people standing in front of her and offered a heartbreaking apology for wasting their time.
Camilo finally stepped forward, cutting through the silence. His voice broached no argument. “You stop working tonight. Both jobs. Effective immediately. Your wages at this estate will continue in full. In fact, I’ll double them every week until Dr. Brandt signs off and says your hands have healed.”
Normally, when Camilo Marquetti issued a decree in that specific tone, reality itself bent to accommodate him. The matter was finished.
Joanna, to everyone’s shock, did not agree.
She looked him dead in the eye, utterly unafraid. “Where will you pay the doubled wages?”
“Through the estate payroll system, naturally.”
Her expression hardened into bitter irony. “Then the predatory lending company will just swallow it.”
“Explain.”
“It’s a percentage-based automatic garnishment,” Joanna explained, her voice sharp with exhaustion. “The more I legally earn on paper, the more their automated algorithm takes. Once, when I worked three consecutive weeks of forced overtime at the laundry, my take-home pay actually dropped eleven dollars compared to the previous month because the interest scaled upward.”
She leaned forward, her voice dropping into a desperate hiss. “If you pay me double, they swallow double. If you pay me ten times as much, they swallow ten times as much. Their automated system is designed so that my payments barely chip away at the compounding interest while constantly adding administrative fees. After three years of paying them, my principal balance has actually increased.”
Then Joanna did something that made Dr. Brandt catch her breath. She looked directly at Camilo Marquetti, utterly shattering the household rule of deference she had blindly obeyed for fourteen agonizing months.
“You can't save me by just throwing more money at the problem,” Joanna said, her voice ringing with hard-earned wisdom. “If you actually want to save me... you have to kill that debt at the root.”
Camilo, realizing that throwing liquid cash at her would only feed the corporate beast, offered to pay her weekly salary directly in physical cash under the table while he handled the predatory lending agency behind the scenes.
Joanna stubbornly refused even that generous compromise.
“I don't need your pity, Mr. Marquetti. And I don't need charity,” she said, her chin lifting with fierce pride. “I need you to pay me exactly what I earned. Nothing more, nothing less.”
She reminded him of her record. She had reported to work at his multi-million-dollar lakefront estate on time every single day. She had never missed a shift, not even when she had staggered into the kitchen with a viral temperature of 102.2 degrees Fahrenheit. No one had ever offered her a word of praise, and she had never asked for praise.
But if Camilo suddenly began handing out financial favors purely because he had accidentally stumbled upon her bleeding hands in the basement, she would lose the only thing she had left.
“I came into this house through my labor and my work,” Joanna said quietly. “If I am going to leave it, or if I am going to stay, I want to do it through my work.”
Camilo Marquetti had spent over a decade surrounded by men and women who constantly bargained, pleaded, flattered, threatened, and sold their souls to him for scraps. Joanna Callahan was the first human being he could ever remember actively refusing his money because accepting it would compromise her fundamental sense of self.
Camilo stared at her for a long, heavy beat, a strange mixture of profound respect and burning fury taking root in his chest.
“All right,” he conceded softly.
She would remain in her exact position, performing her household duties at her exact contracted salary. Not one red cent more.
But until Dr. Brandt personally cleared her hands, she would perform zero manual labor.
“The rest of it,” Camilo added, his green eyes flashing with a cold, lethal promise, “is my problem to fix.”
Dr. Brandt quickly stepped in, slapping temporary orthopedic splints across Joanna’s ruined wrists and issuing a strict medical decree: Joanna was legally forbidden from washing dishes, wringing out fabric, carrying grocery bags, or lifting anything heavier than a glass of water.
Before turning to leave, Camilo told Joanna to go upstairs to the staff quarters and rest.
Joanna, conditioned by years of relentless abuse, blinked in confusion and asked what time she was expected to report for duty the following morning.
May you like
“There is no time,” Camilo told her.
That simple, merciful answer seemed almost incomprehensible to a mind forged in relentless survival.
