Chapter 31 #2
From Zeta’s expression, he knew it was not good news.
He walked straight past his family and continued to the double doors.
Zeta paused, a moment of confusion crossed her face before she pressed her lanyard to the key card reader and the doors opened.
He stepped into the safety of the emergency room, knowing his family could not follow him there without being buzzed back.
When the doors clicked shut, he looked to her for an update.
“They took him up for surgery twenty minutes ago.” She glanced toward the security doors still confused, then back at Liam, her lips pressed in a thin line. “Dr. Khan’s on call. She brought in Valdez to assist. They’re scrubbing in now.”
Valdez was the best vascular man in three counties. That should have been comforting, but it only made the stakes more real. “Aortic?” Liam asked, voice hoarse.
“LAD,” Zeta answered, using the acronym for left anterior descending, the artery that killed more men than any other. “Stemi. Massive.”
Fuck. What she wasn’t saying was what they actually called it. The widowmaker.
Liam’s jaw tightened so hard it ached. “Was he stable?”
“Not when he got here.” She looked down. “They got him back.”
Got him back. Which meant he was gone.
He closed his eyes for a moment, fighting the urge to run down the hall and break into the OR. Instead, he took a deep breath. “Let me see the chart.”
Zeta hesitated. “You know I’m not supposed to—”
“Please,” he said, and the word came out as a rasp.
She sighed, then walked to the nurses’ station. He followed and she logged into the desktop as if reviewing general census numbers, her body shielding the monitor. She clicked through the records, then nudged him closer. “You have one minute.”
Liam scanned the chart, reading the timeline of CPR, EKG findings, initial blood work, the drugs and dosages, and the precise choreography of a code blue that only a fellow doctor could appreciate.
He saw the first signature—Cora’s, trembling on the consent line.
He saw the crash cart entries and the language of crisis medicine and felt his own heart race to match it.
There was only one sentence he needed to read: Transferred emergency to surgery for CABG x3, condition critical.
He stepped back, exhaling so sharply it made Zeta’s ponytail flutter.
“I have to see him,” he said.
“They won’t let you in.” She closed the chart with a quick click. “You need to be with your family. Cora’s on the verge of a meltdown. Your brothers haven’t stopped pacing. Just—” She looked at him, really looked at him. “I know you want to do something, but right now there’s nothing to do.”
He pictured his father upstairs, cut open and vulnerable, and the idea of sitting in a waiting room felt like cowardice. “I’ll be on six.”
Zeta arched a brow. “You’re going to pace the surgical floor by yourself?”
He let the silence be his answer, then turned and started toward the elevators.
He pressed the button for the sixth floor, but the elevator was slow that time of night.
He could hear his pulse in his ears as he waited and could feel the static cling of adrenaline in every cell of his body.
When the doors finally opened, he stepped into the empty metal box and felt the echo of urgency bounce off the walls as it crept up to the sixth floor.
The ding sounded, and he rushed off before the doors even opened completely, slamming his shoulder into the steel.
The usual antiseptic tang and hush of night shift nurses greeted him.
It should have felt like muscle memory, the ride up, the left turn at the corridor, and the quiet click of his shoes on fake marble.
He’d made this trip hundreds, maybe thousands of times, sometimes hourly, sometimes so fried on too much caffeine the floors seemed to roll under him like a funhouse.
But tonight, every step felt foreign, his body moving automatically while his insides lagged two paces behind.
He felt like he was moving in slow motion as he pressed the call button for the observation suite and waited, the seconds stretching so thin he could almost see his own breath in the air.
The door opened with a pneumatic whoosh.
No one inside. He flicked on the wall of monitors, the blue glow illuminating a bank of empty chairs and the big screen on the far side of the glass.
For a moment he just stood there, half-expecting someone to appear—an attending nurse, a tech, a bored resident with a coffee cup—but it was just him and the whirring of the HVAC.
Liam found the feed for the correct surgical suite.
The room was flooded with light so bright it whitened everything: his father’s chest, the blue drapes, and the glint of the retractor prying his ribcage open.
Dr. Khan, her scrub cap set with a line of cartoon cats, was bent over the table, hands steady as she manipulated the arterial graft.
Valdez, hovered at her elbow, passing clamps and wipes, his forehead furrowed in concentration.
On the edge of the frame, two nurses moved with practiced choreography, a silent ballet of suction, suture, and hands in latex gloves.
Liam watched, every heartbeat of his own mirroring the beeping of the telemetry on screen.
His eyes watched the EKG tracing in the upper corner, he marked the rise and fall of the lines, the way they dove and lurched with every jolt of the heart-lung machine.
There was a smudge of blood on the camera lens.
He noticed a flutter of movement as someone adjusted the lighting.
He watched Dr. Khan snip through fibrotic tissue, the texture bizarrely familiar even magnified to the size of a dinner plate.
With each cut, Liam felt his own chest tighten, as if the scalpel was slicing him open too.
He lasted two minutes, three at most, before a wave of nausea swept over him. He staggered back from the monitor. The room spun. He blinked, tried to focus on the clock above the scrub sink.
He needed air. Needed space.
His legs felt like they’d been dipped in cement as he stumbled out of the observation suite, the door slamming shut behind him. Liam crashed against, then leaned on the nearest wall, eyes closed, forehead pressed to the cold paint. He tried to count his breaths.
Helplessness overwhelmed him. It closed in on him. Crushed him. Knowing exactly what was happening, and being powerless to change the outcome by even a single iota made him feel claustrophobic.
Was this what his dad had felt with his mom?
Would he ever have the chance to ask him?
Would it be too late?
He tried to shake that thought off as he continued down the hall to the elevator and stopped, his finger hovering in front of the button.
He couldn’t go down to Cora. Couldn’t face Frankie, or his brother or the twins, without answers. He had nothing to offer them. No explanations, no comfort, not even the pretense of hope.
Like a beacon calling him, he found himself continuing to the end of the hall, to a door assigned: Family Waiting Area.
The sign was both a promise and a threat, family, waiting.
He hesitated, then pushed the door open, prepared to face anxious relatives, not his, they were in the ER waiting room because his dad had been rushed to surgery from there, but the familiar din of anxiety and hushed cell phone conversations.
Instead, there were just two people. A couple, maybe in their thirties, sat in the far corner, hands clasped so tight their fingers interlocked, sitting in silence.
They glanced up as Liam entered, their eyes glazed with exhaustion and fear, then looked away again, as if they wanted to preserve his privacy as much as their own.
He collapsed into the first chair he saw, which gave a tired wheeze under his weight, and let his head fall into his hands as he rested his elbows on his thighs.
The room felt enormous, every creak of the floor or chair, shift of fabric resounded off the four walls.
A television on mute showed the early morning news, weather, stocks, and a local fire.
Someone had left a half-eaten bag of chips on the end table.
The clock on the wall now read 4:32 a.m. Liam watched as the minutes crawled.
He told himself he’d only sit for a second, enough time to let the tremor in his hands subside. But as the adrenaline faded, all the other feelings started to press in, heavy as an elephant sitting on his chest. He tried to distract himself with a medical puzzle.
Was it just the LAD?
Was there ventricular rupture?
Could they salvage the ejection fraction with hypothermic perfusion?
But his brain refused to cooperate. It kept skipping back, not to the surgery, but to the mess of his own life.
Was this what it always came to?
Catastrophic diagnosis and regrets?
He regretted chasing the fast track, the way he’d crushed through his accelerated program in three years just to impress his dad, to prove that he had the Sterling gene for excellence.
He regretted every time he’d chosen school over home, the way he’d missed damn near every family dinner until there were no more left to attend.
He regretted leaving Frankie—fuck, how he regretted that.
He replayed the morning he’d left her after the funeral.
Not because he wanted to. Because he was terrified at his feelings and disgusted with himself.
He thought she’d be better off without him.
He regretted every second he spent telling himself that he was protecting her, when in reality he was just punishing himself for what he’d perceived as an unforgivable, unfixable mistake.
He regretted never meeting his biological father, the man whose existence forever tainted his family.
He’d told himself he didn’t care. He tried to convince himself that it was just genetics and nothing more, but in the end, his entire life had been shaped by ghosts and secrets.
He was a collection of other people’s wounds, stitched together with lies and pride.
He regretted so many things, but right now, sitting in that ugly green chair, he regretted nothing more than the time he’d wasted hating his dad.
All those years spent resenting his old man’s silence and resenting a childhood that his worth was measured in achievements, and he was made to feel his love had to be earned, only to come up short on both.
Liam wasted his entire life trying to exceed the expectations his dad had held him to just to spite him, and now, now when he finally saw the man behind that cold, unattainable, detached facade, and understood that he wasn’t the man he thought he was and would never get a chance at a clean slate?
When for the first time he felt like he’d met his dad, the man, not the role he’d been playing or the mask he’d worn, and now he was going to lose him?
Two drops splashed on the white LVT floor between his feet.
Liam hadn’t even known he was crying until he saw them, that was how unaware—how detached he felt from himself.
He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand, furious at himself for feeling this much, yet not feeling anything, at the same time.
For not being able to switch it off the way he did with every other problem and go downstairs.
He wanted to pull Frankie into his arms and hold her, but he couldn’t.
He wanted to comfort Cora, but he couldn’t.
He wanted to walk back into the OR, shove Dr. Khan out of the way, and fix his dad himself, but he couldn’t.
He was stuck in a fluorescent-lit box, waiting for news that could change his life in one sentence.
The door creaked open, and he flinched, mind racing through every possibility. His next breath froze in his airways, but his body’s response was a false alarm. Dr. Jackson walked in. He was a pediatric surgeon.
Dr. Jackson’s expression registered surprise to find a former colleague in the waiting area, as he passed by him and walked over to the couple in the corner.
Liam watched as the man and woman shot out of their chairs and looked up at the doctor with all-too-familiar Obi-Wan-hope.
Liam had looked into those exact eyes hundreds of times.
He’d had to walk out to families and loved ones who looked at him with those eyes, silently pleading with him that he was their only hope.
And he knew the horrible truth, that no matter how much hope, how much faith, how much prayer, crying, threats, money, begging, bribing or bargaining that couple had done, the outcome had been decided before that door opened.
Liam watched as the man and woman both exhaled the exhale he also knew well, and he found himself exhaling right along with them.
It was a breath of relief. The woman collapsed in her chair, sobbing with a smile spread wide across her face as the man shook Dr. Jackson’s hand, thanking him repeatedly before pulling him into a hug as if he’d just saved his life, which Liam realized Dr. Jackson had actually done one better.
When Liam got a good look at the man’s face, he recognized the couple.
Their son, Josh, if he remembered the name correctly, was a nine-year-old with lupus and had been in the emergency room several times with complications from his condition.
The last time Liam treated him he was going into renal failure, and had been on a list for a donor, he must have received a kidney and just had a transplant.
As happy as he was for the kid and his parents, and he was truly happy, Liam really hoped the hospital had two miracles in it today, even though he knew it didn’t work that way, and he wasn’t even sure he believed in miracles.
Dr. Jackson left, and the couple in the corner fell into each other’s arms, held each other and cried. Liam couldn’t begin to imagine what they’d been through, but he did know that they’d gone through it together.
Liam ran his hands through his hair, he knew he didn’t have any control over what the outcome of his dad’s surgery was, but he did have control over some things, like his relationships.
If he’d learned anything the past couple of weeks, it was that those were the most important things in his life.
The people. Relationships. Nothing else mattered.
From now on, he was not going to shut people out, to live on his island of one, as he’d been accused of doing.
It would at least have two inhabitants, if he had anything to say about it.