“Give me the phone, Claire!” “Who is ‘we’?” I shouted.

His face went completely pale, but he would not answer, and I jammed his phone deep into my purse just as red emergency lights began flashing through the front windows.

The paramedics came through the door with a stretcher, fast and professional, and one began checking Mark’s vitals while the other cleared the crowd of stunned relatives out of the hallway.

“We have an extremely faint cardiac rhythm!” the medic called out.