Plenty of people had called him ruthless, but no one had ever called him humble.
Then he’d graduated and begun his internship, followed by his residency, followed by his fellowships. Working on children’s hearts had a way of maturing a person. The job had taught him that no human or technological advance of the last century had the ability to improve on God’s ingenious design of the human heart.
Sebastian was not the architect of the heart. He was simply a very well-trained plumber. His goal today, and every day, was to restore defective hearts as close as possible to God’s blueprint. The more effectively he could do that, the better and faster his patient would recover.
The phone rang. Dave, the anesthesiologist, answered, then murmured to the caller.
Sebastian continued without pause, his attention fixed on closing the hole between the left and right ventricles. The heart-lung bypass machine hummed, doing the work of both the heart and the lungs during surgery by pumping the infant’s blood through his body. The less time Mateo was on bypass, the better, so Sebastian had to make the right decisions, and he had to make them fast.
He also had to think two, six, eight steps ahead. The best surgeons possessed more than knowledge and skillful hands. They possessed feel. In this line of work, disaster was usually the result of several minor mistakes instead of a major one. He was learning to recognize subtle patterns and anticipate every way in which things could go wrong.
“A baby with transposition of the great arteries has been delivered in Macon,” Dave said to him, holding the phone against his chest. “His name’s Josiah Douglas. Fourteen hours old, eight pounds. They’re transporting him here by ambulance.”
Sebastian paused his stitching and looked up over his surgeon’s loupes. “Have they started him on prostaglandins?”
“Yes.”
“When will he arrive?”
“About an hour.”
He bent his head back to his task. His current repair was progressing like poetry.
Josiah would need a septostomy procedure today. Then, after giving him a week or so to recover and grow, an arterial switch operation.
The Clinic for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Diseases here at Beckett Memorial was one of the most prestigious in the country, alongside Boston Children’s, the Cleveland Clinic, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and the University of California San Francisco.
The surgical team and the pediatric intensive care team here ran an extremely successful defense against death. They’d do whatever they could to ensure that they did not lose Mateo. Or Josiah.
Not today, God.
Not on my watch.
When Sebastian entered Josiah’s room that evening, a distinctive, now-familiar energy closed around him. None of the energy originated with the boy, who lay unconscious on his warming bed. All of it came from the bright, hard-working machines sustaining his life.
Josiah’s light brown hair lay against his round head at strange angles. He had big cheeks and a small mouth.
As Sebastian stood at his bedside, feeling his tiredness, an image of Leah slipped into his mind. He saw again exactly how she’d looked at the farmers market, surrounded by flowers. He replayed the moment when her eyes met his—
Stop it.
Weeks had passed since that day, and he wanted her out of his head.
He was no longer a child who took toys from other people and felt nothing when they cried. But that didn’t mean that it was in his nature to sit on the sidelines while other people pursued the things he wanted.
It wasn’t.
It was in his nature to go after the things he wanted single-mindedly. Which is exactly what he would have done had the obstacle between himself and Leah been anything and anyone other than Ben. As it was, he could do nothing, which sent frustration scratching down his limbs.
She’s off limits, he kept telling himself.
She’s off limits.
Three days later, Ben stopped in the open doorway of Leah’s classroom. “Want anything from the break room?” he asked.
She paused the motion of the sponge she was using to clean her whiteboard. Ben’s easygoing, open personality never failed to brighten her day. “Watermelon-flavored sparkling water?”
“You bet.”
He vanished. The space he’d vacated framed a view of the hallway, lockers, and passing students.
Ben occupied the classroom across the hall and four doors down from hers. They shared a free period, so at the same time almost every day, he stopped by to ask if she wanted anything from the teacher break room.
She finished cleaning her board and turned to observe her happy, tidy classroom. Semicircles of chairs radiated away from where she was standing toward the opposing wall, which contained a bank of windows. She’d stocked her bookshelves with textbooks, binders, and notebooks from her years at Clemmons, her large personal collection of books about math, and a few potted succulents and inspirational quotes.
Primary-colored portraits of the world’s most renowned math minds filled every remaining patch of wall space. Thus Hypatia, Euler, Gauss, Cantor, and more looked down on her daily.
“Here’s hoping I’m doing the lot of you proud,” she said. “Please do intervene and speak up if I’m not.”
She scooped a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil stub off the floor, depositing them in the trash before taking a seat at her desk. Outside, a breeze stirred the trees draping the hills.
Since receiving her second round of test results from YourHeritage, she’d been working to metabolize her genetic truth. It had shifted the earth she walked on. It was confusing and painful. But the best course forward was to accept what could not be changed. And so, gradually, she was learning to coexist with the revelations about her DNA the way she might coexist with a mutt who appeared one day and insisted on following her everywhere.
She had no plans to reach out to her mom. Mom had been apprised of the situation and could call her for additional information whenever she chose. Nor did Leah have plans, at this point, anyway, to tell Dylan what she’d discovered. It would upset him, and what purpose would that serve?
So far, she’d settled on just one course of action. She wanted to find answers to the questions her DNA tests had raised.
She’d been born at Magnolia Avenue Hospital in Atlanta. If she could examine Magnolia Avenue’s records on the babies born on the same day that she’d been born, she might be able to work out which biological parents were hers.
But first, she’d need to convince the hospital to show her their records. She knew just enough about the privacy regulations pertaining to hospital data to know that in order to gain access to those records, she’d need an expert on her side.
Ben sailed into her classroom and handed her the can of sparkling water. Today he’d paired a dark purple short-sleeved polo with gray pants and spotless black leather sneakers with thick white soles.
“Thank you,” she said. “Do you realize that if we walk somewhere side-by-side today, we’ll look like a study in color wheel opposites?”
“We will?”
“Yes. Yellow.” She pointed to her blouse, then to him. “And purple.”
“Ah.”
“Sir Isaac Newton would be pleased.”
“Because?”
“Because he was the first to split sunlight into beams of color and invented the color wheel.”