Brandon spent those hours walking the corridor outside the surgical wing so many times that he came to know every scuff in the floor tile, every burned-out letter in the illuminated signage, every squeak of his own shoes on the polished vinyl.

His mother sat in the family waiting room with her hands folded and her lips moving, praying the way she prayed, quietly and constantly and without any expectation of being heard, and Brandon walked, and the clock crawled, and the six-hour mark came and went, and then the seventh hour, and the eighth, and he stopped letting himself think about what a longer surgery might mean.

At last, near the ninth hour, the chief pediatric surgeon came through the double doors in his scrubs, and Brandon stopped mid-stride, and could not make himself walk toward the man to hear it.

The surgeon pulled off his cap, and he was smiling.

“It was complicated,” he said. “More than we expected going in — there was more scarring than the imaging showed. But she pulled through. We repaired the defect.

Her heart is beating strong, on its own, exactly the way it should.” He put a hand on Brandon’s shoulder. “She’s going to grow up, son.”