"Oh Tess? I was just about to call you." A female nurse entered the room, holding a clipboard. "Your mother was moved."
"Is she awake?"
"I'm afraid not. Her condition has worsened."
"Then why would you take her off the machine? I thought you said that was the only way for her to stay alive?" Tessa's eyes widened.
"It is but we bill by the hour."
"And I pay every week." Tessa took a step in the nurse's direction.
The check bounced. “We hooked her to a cheap and older machine. Though, I must warn you. It's not as effective."
"Where's my mother?"
The nurse put her hand around Tessa's shoulder and guided her out of the room, closing the door gently behind her. "Listen, she's safe for now because you've never defaulted on any payment but our machines are in high demand. If you can't pay today, your mother will have to leave the hospital."
"But... But she'll die."
"You have less than 24 hours, Tessa. We've done our best."
Tessa called her bank immediately and she found that her boss didn't pay her for last night and he also filed a claim against her for the damage of his restaurant, so all of her weekly pay was not transferred to her.
She called Amadeus and screamed at him over the phone but he told her to go to hell. Since Tessa didn't know the direction to hell, she went for the closest thing she knew which was also the source of her problem--- Vincenzo Mancini's house.
Finding his house proved to be tougher than she expected but it turned out that rivalry among Mafia groups was so strong that all she had to do was claim that she had a message for Vincent about one of the rivals to the Mancini family, and she was practically offered a road map to Mancini family villa but most people told her it was a trip from which she might not survive.
She was willing to take the chance, considering the fact that she didn't even know if the man she met that night was an imposter. If her mother died, she had nothing to live for. She still had the wristwatch and she could sell it but it was nothing in the face of the bills that faced her.