19. Killian
— ? —
Killian
They were walking me through quarterly projections, and I hadn’t heard a word of it.
I sat at the head of the conference table in the Kerrington Labs satellite office in Boston, surrounded by people in expensive suits holding tablets full of numbers, and I couldn’t focus on a single word they were saying.
“The Seoul partnership is tracking ahead of schedule,” someone was explaining. “If we hit the milestones we projected, we’re looking at a significant increase in-”
“Sorry, what was the timeline on that again?”
“Three months, as discussed. Mr. Kerrington, are you all right? You seem distracted.”
Distracted. That was one word for it. My mind was on Nantucket, on Sabrina, on the way she’d walked out of the library without saying a word after we’d… after. I kept replaying it, the expression on her face, trying to decipher whether she was angry or overwhelmed or past both.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Continue.”
“As I was saying, the revenue projections show-”
My phone rang.
I’d silenced it for the meeting, but I’d left it on the table because some part of me couldn’t bear to be completely unreachable. The screen lit up with a name that made my heart stutter.
Sabrina.
Sabrina was calling me. Sabrina, who hadn’t voluntarily called me in weeks. Sabrina, who communicated through terse texts and the occasional voice note and nothing else.
If she was calling, something was wrong.
I grabbed the phone and answered in front of everyone, not caring about the meeting, not caring about the projections, not caring about anything except the fear that was already clawing its way up my throat.
“Sabrina? Are you okay, love?”
The voice that answered wasn’t Sabrina.
“Daddy?”
Ivy. Ivy’s voice, high and thin and absolutely terrified, breaking on my name in a way that turned my blood to ice.
“Ivy? Sweetheart, what’s wrong? Where’s Mommy?”
“Mommy is on the ground.” She was sobbing, the words barely intelligible. “She won’t wake up, Daddy. I tried to wake her up but her eyes are closed and she won’t move and I don’t know what to do. Daddy, I don’t know what to do.”
The conference room disappeared. The people in suits, the tablets, the quarterly projections, all of it vanished, replaced by a roaring in my ears and a terror so absolute I couldn’t breathe.
“Ivy, listen to me.” I was standing, I realized. I didn’t remember standing. “I need you to stay calm, okay? Can you do that for me?”
“I’m scared.”
“I know you are, baby. I’m scared too. But I need you to be brave for just a little while longer. Can you tell me where Mommy is? Is she in the house?”
“She’s by the door. She was talking to someone and then she made a funny noise and she fell down.”
I was moving, walking out of the conference room without excusing myself, ignoring the confused calls of my name. The phone was pressed so hard against my ear that it hurt.
“Okay, sweetheart. Okay. I need you to stay with Mommy. Don’t leave her, all right? I’m going to get help.”
“Don’t hang up.” Her voice broke into fresh sobs. “Please don’t hang up, Daddy. I don’t want to be alone.”
“I’m not going to hang up. I promise. I’m going to stay on the line with you the whole time.”
But I couldn’t call for help if I didn’t hang up. I couldn’t call my mother, couldn’t call an ambulance, couldn’t do anything useful as long as I was on the phone with my daughter.
I burst through the doors of the office building and onto the busy Boston street. People everywhere, walking, talking, living their normal lives while mine was crumbling.
A man was standing near the entrance, scrolling through his phone. He looked up when I approached, startled by whatever expression was on my face.
“I need your help.” I was already pulling out my wallet. “Right now. It’s an emergency.”
“What? I don’t-”
I shoved a wad of cash at him, bills crumpled together without counting. “A thousand dollars. More if you want it. I need you to make calls on your phone while I stay on mine. My wife is unconscious and my daughter is alone with her and I can’t hang up.”
The man stared at me, then at the money, then back at me. Whatever was on my face must have convinced him, because he nodded and pocketed the cash.
“What do you need me to call?”
“First call: Bridget Kerrington.” I rattled off my mother’s number from memory, the digits engraved in my brain. “Tell her to go to this address immediately.” I gave him the house address. “Tell her Sabrina is unconscious and Ivy is alone. Tell her to run.”
The man was already dialing.
“Second call: 911. Give them the same address. Tell them a pregnant woman is unconscious and unresponsive.” The words came out of my mouth before I could think about them.
Pregnant. I didn’t know for certain, but I’d seen the signs, the crackers for breakfast, the dizziness, the way she’d doubled over in the grocery store.
Some part of me had known, even if she hadn’t told me.
“Daddy?” Ivy’s voice in my ear, small and scared. “Who are you talking to?”
“I’m talking to a nice man who’s going to help us. I’m still here, sweetheart. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Okay, I’ve got your mother on the line,” the stranger said. “She’s asking what’s happening.”
“Give me the phone. Keep mine, keep talking to my daughter.”
We swapped. I grabbed the stranger’s phone and pressed it to my ear.
“Mom.”
“Killian? What’s going on? This man said Sabrina-”
“She’s unconscious. Ivy’s with her. I’m in Boston, I can’t get there fast enough, you need to go now. Right now. Run to the house and take care of them until the ambulance arrives.”
“Oh my God.” Her voice went sharp with fear, then steadied. She was Bridget Kerrington. She didn’t fall apart. “I’m going. Your father’s here too. We’re leaving now.”
“Call me the second you get there. The second.”
“I will.”
I handed the phone back to the stranger, who was talking gently to Ivy through my phone, asking her about her favorite color and whether she liked ice cream. Keeping her calm. Keeping her distracted.
“What’s the ambulance status?”
“Dispatched. They said they’re on the way.”
“Thank you. I need to make one more call and then I need my phone back.”
I grabbed his phone again and called the charter service I used for emergencies. Money could fix most things, and right now I needed it to fix the distance between Boston and Nantucket.
“I need a jet to Nantucket. Now. Right now. I don’t care what it costs.”
“Sir, we have a plane available in-”
“Now. Tell the pilot to be ready by the time I get there. I’ll pay triple.”
I hung up and took my phone back from the stranger.
“Thank you,” I said. “I mean it. Thank you.”
“I hope your wife is okay.”
I was already moving, flagging down a taxi, climbing in before it had fully stopped.
“Ivy? Are you still there?”
“I’m here, Daddy.” She sounded exhausted, her voice hoarse from crying. “The nice man asked me about ice cream.”
“That’s good. That’s really good. I’m coming, okay? I’m getting on a plane right now and I’m coming to you.”
“What about Mommy?”
“Grandma and Grandpa are on their way. They’re going to take care of Mommy until the doctors get there. And then the doctors are going to make her all better.”
“Do you swear?”
My throat closed around the word. I wanted to promise. I wanted to guarantee that Sabrina would be fine, that this was nothing, that I’d land and find her sitting up in bed laughing about how she’d scared everyone.
But I couldn’t lie to my daughter.
“I promise I’m going to do everything I can,” I said. “I promise I love you and Mommy more than anything in the world. And I promise I’m coming as fast as I possibly can.”
The taxi got me to the airport in record time. The jet was waiting on the tarmac, the pilot already in the cockpit. I climbed the stairs with the phone still pressed to my ear, Ivy’s breathing the only sound.
“We’re taking off now,” I told her. “It’s going to be a little while until I land. Can you be brave a little longer?”
“I think so.”
“That’s my girl.”
The engines roared to life. The plane began to move, and I felt the distance between us in every cell of my body.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Why did Mommy fall down?”
“The doctors are still working that out. But they’re going to figure it out and fix it.”
“She looked really pale. And she was holding her tummy.”
Her tummy. Of course she was holding her tummy. Because there was a baby in there, a baby I hadn’t known about, a baby she’d been carrying alone through all of this.
The rage and the fear and the love tangled together in my chest until I couldn’t tell them apart.
“The doctors are going to take care of her,” I said again, because I didn’t know what else to say.
We were in the air when I heard voices in the background of the call. Ivy’s crying shifted, became higher, and then I heard my mother’s voice.
“Ivy! Ivy, sweetheart, we’re here. Let me see Mommy.”
“Grandma!” Ivy’s sob of relief. “Grandma, I was so scared. She wouldn’t wake up.”
“I know, baby. I know. You were so brave. The ambulance is coming, they’re right behind us.”
More voices. The paramedics, I assumed. Professional tones, rapid questions, the sounds of equipment being moved.
“Mom?” I called into the phone. “Mom, can you hear me? What’s happening?”
But the phone had been dropped or forgotten in the chaos. I could hear fragments of conversation, snippets of medical terminology, Ivy crying in the background, and then the line went dead.
The screen said it plainly. Call ended.
I tried calling back. No answer.
My mother’s number rang and rang.
My father didn’t pick up either.
The flight took a lifetime. I sat in the leather seat of the private jet and stared out the window at the clouds below, and I prayed to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in.
Please let her be okay. Please let the baby be okay. Please give me a chance to make this right.
The plane landed at the Nantucket airport and I was out the door before the stairs were fully extended. A car was waiting, Sully, bless him, must have gotten word and arranged it, and I threw myself into the passenger seat.
“Hospital. Now.”
The driver didn’t ask questions. He just drove.
I burst through the doors of Nantucket Cottage Hospital with my heart in my throat and my hands shaking so badly I could barely walk straight.
“My wife,” I said to the first person I saw, a nurse behind the reception desk. “Where is my wife? Sabrina Kerrington. She was brought in by ambulance. Is she okay? Somebody tell me something.”
“Sir, if you’ll just calm down-”
“I won’t calm down. My wife is here somewhere and my daughter called me crying because she wouldn’t wake up and I’ve been on a plane unable to reach anyone and I need to know if she’s okay.”
“Killian.”
I spun around. Tessa was standing in the doorway to the waiting area, her face streaked with tears.
“She’s okay,” Tessa said quickly. “She’s stable. Come with me.”
I followed her through a maze of corridors, past nurses’ stations and equipment carts and the antiseptic smell that I would forever associate with the worst day of my life.
The room was small and private. My parents were there, my mother holding Ivy, who was asleep against her shoulder, exhausted from crying. Sully was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, his face grim.
And in the bed, pale and still and connected to monitors that beeped softly, was Sabrina.
I crossed the room and sank into the chair beside her bed. My hand found hers on the blanket, her fingers cold against my palm.
“Sabrina,” I whispered. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
She didn’t respond. Her eyes were closed, her chest rising and falling with slow, even breaths.
But she was breathing. She was alive.
I pressed my forehead against our joined hands and let the tears come.