“And so,” he said quietly, “it begins.”

Chapter 14 — St. Jude’s

The next morning, before Julian and Victoria could mount whatever they were planning, Caleb was admitted to St.

Jude’s Children’s Hospital.

Arthur had wired the funds the instant the marriage was legal, and money of that kind moves mountains that had stood immovable before me for years.

Within hours, a surgical team I could never have reached on my own, the finest pediatric heart specialists in the country, people whose names I had only ever read in journals, had been assembled around my son.

I stood in the admitting area holding Caleb’s small hand, watching nurses I would once have worked beside now working for him, and I could hardly breathe for the strangeness of it.