Chapter 9 - The Long Night
By two o'clock on Friday morning, the snow was falling heavily over the medical center, burying the streets of Chicago under four inches of white quiet.
Sebastian sat in the small waiting alcove outside Operating Room 4 on the sixth floor.
Claire had been moved down from the seventh floor twenty minutes earlier after her blood pressure dropped to 70 over 40. Dr. Miller’s team had determined that they could no longer wait for the heparin to dissolve the leg clot; the risk of a placental abruption was now absolute.
The red light over the double doors of Operating Room 4 was illuminated.
Every twelve minutes, the automatic doors would open, and a nurse in green scrubs would hurry out carrying a tray of used sponges, cold IV bags, or blood sample vials to be rushed to the lab.
Sebastian sat on a wooden bench, his back pressed against the cold brick wall.
Arthur Vance sat three seats down, holding a paper cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago.
“The marshals have locked down the Zurich account,” Arthur said quietly, breaking a three-hour silence. “Ryan’s clinic has been notified. They’re transferring him to the public university hospital in Canton Cantonment under Swiss federal oversight.”
“Will he survive?” Sebastian asked, not turning his head.
“The doctors in Zurich say he has three weeks,” Arthur said. “They can’t perform the transplant without the cord tissue.”
Sebastian closed his eyes.
He thought of his brother at twelve years old—a skinny kid in hand-me-down jeans who used to sit on the back of Sebastian’s delivery truck while they hauled recycled paper through the industrial parks of Gary, Indiana. Ryan had been terrified of the dark; he used to leave the hall door open three inches so the light from the kitchen would hit his bed.
“When we’re rich, Seb,” Ryan had said one night, sitting on the edge of his cot, “we’re going to buy a house with twenty rooms and leave all the lights on all night.”
Sebastian had built the house. He had paid for the lights. But the boy who sat on the back of the truck had been gone for a long time, replaced by a shadow fed on his mother’s poison.
At three-fifteen, the red light over Operating Room 4 went out.
The heavy double doors swung open, and Dr. Richard Miller walked out. He had pulled his mask down around his neck; his surgical cap was dark with sweat, and his eyes were bloodshot.
Sebastian stood up so quickly his knees hit the edge of the low wooden bench.
Miller stopped three feet away. He did not say anything for five long seconds.
“Dr. Miller?” Sebastian’s voice was barely a whisper.
Miller reached up, pulled off his surgical cap, and wiped his wet forehead with the back of his hand.
“She’s in recovery,” Miller said.
Sebastian felt his lungs expand for the first time in twelve hours. “And... and Claire?”
“We performed an emergency C-section and a simultaneous thrombectomy to remove the clot from her femoral vein,” Miller said. “She lost a significant amount of blood—we transfused four units of packed red cells—but her blood pressure has stabilized at 110 over 70. Her liver enzymes are already beginning to drop.”
Miller paused, a small, genuine smile finally appearing at the corners of his mouth.
“And the boy?” Sebastian asked, his hands shaking at his sides.
“He weighs two pounds, eleven ounces,” Miller said. “His lungs are underdeveloped, so he’s on an oscillator in the neonatal ICU. But he has an Apgar score of seven at five minutes, his brain scan is completely clear, and he’s fighting like a lion.”
Miller reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of pink paper—a standard birth record card.
“Time of birth: three-seven a.m.,” Miller read. “He’s going to be in an incubator for six weeks, Sebastian. But he’s going to live.”
Sebastian covered his face with both hands.
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The sound that came out of him was not a quiet sigh; it was a deep, chest-heaving sob that had been buried under twelve years of work, sixty million dollars of deals, and thirty years of his mother’s voice telling him he was nothing more than a truck driver’s son.
Arthur Vance reached out, placed a broad, heavy hand on Sebastian’s shoulder, and held him steady while the snow fell silent against the glass outside.
