The nurse clucked, and muttered under her breath softly, but loud enough for Jo to hear, “Oh, to be young and beautiful … she was worried sick about you, you know?  Lucky you.”

Jo grinned broadly as she reached for the jello.  “Yup, she is beautiful isn’t she?  And I know I am damn lucky.”  She liked that the nurse and people in the hospital thought they were together, and didn’t feel inclined to correct their assumption.  Who knows, maybe by the time we get to Seattle, Becca and I will be together?

The nurse left after taking her vitals again, promising to return in about an hour.  Becca was still on the phone, and it sounded like she was talking to someone different from the person she was talking to earlier.

Jo lifted the lid that covered what she guessed was a soup bowl, and leaned forward to sniff it.  Just as she wrinkled her nose in disappointment, Becca called out, “Heyy, Jo?  Question about what you’d like to do concerning your stay here?   When we got to the ER I dug out your insurance card in your wallet and gave my credit card to cover anything extra.  It’s no big deal, and I was planning to ask our family office to square everything, but now that you’re awake, I thought you’d like to decide how to handle this.  I’m on the phone with the family office right now, so …”

Jo was familiar with the concept of a family office, which was a type of firm that handled all manner of transactions for a family from dry-cleaning and credit card bills, to more serious things like financial investments and trusts.  It was a type of setup that the 10% of the one percenters of the world were accustomed to.  So Becca’s family has a family office?  Did not see that coming.  It doesn’t change things for me – but I hope she doesn’t think that I’m into her because her family’s got …. nah.  She doesn’t seem to be that kind of person.

Jo was not in Becca’s league but her family was more than ok, and she knew her insurance was pretty comprehensive.  Plus, if she wanted to, a quick call to her mom’s assistant would fix everything with the hospital.  But she’d stopped doing calling home or her parents’ assistants for help long ago, from the time she’d left their Pound Ridge home to make her own way in life, starting with going to MIT.  There was no way she was going to change things now.    Or, Jo herself could take over from Becca’s family’s family office, but she didn’t feel that she had the stamina yet to go toe-to-toe with a hospital’s billing department.  And calling her mom or dad would likely needlessly trigger a series of things, including Jo being grounded in Chicago and likely forced to give up her London gig.  That would really suck.  Neither mom or dad had been convinced that Jo, their only child, was up to working a proper job while recovering from cancer, much less leaving the US for what they insisted was a needlessly stressful job.