Josiah had been a full-term newborn. Tiny Isabella weighed less than six pounds. A cap covered her bald head. Long eyelashes rested against the ivory skin of her face.
Outwardly, she looked like a perfectly formed preemie. Her exterior didn’t reveal her life-threatening interior flaw.
Megan, Isabella’s mother, had told him they were trusting God to give their daughter a new heart. But Sebastian knew that one in four babies in need of a transplant would die before a donor organ could be found.
He pushed the thought from his head.
When Megan had asked him if he was a believer, he’d said that he was. Which was true. Yet his history with God was not clear-cut.
He’d had zero familiarity with God during his early years. Then the worst thing that could have happened to him—his only parent’s death—had happened. He’d landed with Christian foster parents who’d taken him to church. There, people had occasionally said things to him like “God’s ways are mysterious.” Or “God is with you in your grief.”
He hadn’t believed in God’s existence, so Christianity had seemed like an idiotic waste of time. But even if he had believed God existed, he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with a supposedly all-powerful God who could have kept his mother alive and hadn’t. Mostly, the idea of God made him angry.
Then he’d been forced to take a scholarship slot on a junior high mission trip to El Salvador, which had only made him angrier. Their group had just finished running a kids’ sports camp for the day when a counselor had asked him and a few others to return equipment to a nearby building. He’d been carrying stacks of orange cones through a basement hallway when the earthquake hit and everything had gone black.
The floor and walls jerked and jerked. Terror subsumed him. Escape. Get out!
A girl was panting and gasping behind him.
Dropping the cones, he stumbled toward the dim light ahead. His shoulder rammed into the wall. Dust rattled over him, clogging his nose and mouth. Why won’t it stop?
A hand wrapped around Sebastian’s forearm and yanked him forward, then forward again. He staggered into a small central room where two hallways met. Rectangular windows at sidewalk level above revealed the scene. A kid named Luke had pulled him out. Ben and Natasha stared at him with terrified eyes, their arms spread for balance as they fought to stay upright.
The building groaned and metal screamed. Pieces of the ceiling crashed down. Two of the room’s concrete walls collapsed inward, crashing into each other and forming a tent shape above their heads.
His heart roared. We’re going to die.
He’d continued to believe that for every one of the eight days he’d spent underground. Ben, Natasha, Genevieve, and Luke had families who loved them and were desperate for their safe return. Next to them, he was the broken toy nobody wanted.
We’re going to die.
When the search and rescue team took the building apart in an effort to reach them, he’d been sure the structure would cave in and they’d be crushed. Instead, God had protected them in the clearest way possible.
Sebastian had come face to face with the God he’d denied.
God did exist. He’d been wrong about that. But what was he supposed to do with a God who hadn’t saved his mother but had saved him?
After returning from El Salvador, he, Ben, Natasha, and Genevieve spent months traveling around and telling their story to reporters, churches, authors, screenwriters. The Colemans brought him to church with them on Sundays, sent him to church camp in the summers, took him on another mission trip, talked with him again and again about faith.
When he was a teenager, he’d prayed for salvation. His motives had been partly good. He’d honestly wanted God to fill the hungry hole within him that longed for security. But his motives had also been partly selfish. He’d been a practical, street-smart kid who’d seen the wisdom in hedging his bets for eternity.
To this day, he attended church semi-regularly. However, he’d never gotten over all of his resentment toward God. Nor could he bring himself to trust God fully.
In high school, he’d worked for a college scholarship. In college, he’d worked for a med school scholarship. In med school, he’d worked to become a surgeon. Himself, his degrees, his job, his bank account. Those things he could trust in.
Yet even though he’d gotten everything he’d ever wanted, his life had been flat for months. Now that he could finally stop clawing and scraping for the next achievement, he was realizing that . . .
It still wasn’t enough. Which infuriated him and left him feeling betrayed. Deceived.
No one would look at him these days and think of him as a broken toy nobody wanted.
No one, that is, except him.
He’d worked incredibly hard to prove everything he’d had to prove. By rights, his accomplishments should have made him feel secure and given him vengeance over his mother’s death and repaid the loss he’d suffered when he was young.
But that’s not how things had gone down. He might look healthy on the outside, just like Isabella Ackerman did. But, like her, he was flawed on the inside.
As flawed as he’d always been.
He smoothed the tubes draping over the side of Isabella’s bed.
The team at the Clinic for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Diseases had helped Isabella as much as she could be helped at this point. Their task now? Keep her alive until she reached the top of the transplant list.
The intensivists and the experienced group of nurses here made it their business to know every detail about every child. The best nurses came to care for each patient and, often even more so, their parents, because the parents were the ones who talked with them, who shared their stories and their fears.
Sebastian couldn’t afford to invest too much of himself in any one patient. Or, after the things that had happened to him, in any one person.
Leah included.
So how come he still couldn’t let her go?
“There’s something special about you, Sebastian. Something appealing.” Her words to him were nothing, really. Yet, he’d replayed them over and over. When stressed. When he couldn’t sleep. When he retreated to his office after receiving bad news on one of his patients.
The memory of her saying that to him loosened the hard knot at the center of his chest.
But as soon as the knot loosened, he’d remember how Ben felt about Leah, and shame would twist his stomach.
He had more than enough to keep him busy here at the hospital. His life should be complete. But it was as if Leah’s reentrance into his world had shined light on the emptiness that had been inside of him for a long time.
He’d been pretending the emptiness didn’t exist and doing a semi-decent job of that.
Until her.
The morning after Leah and Dylan returned to Misty River in late July, Dylan rushed off to see his friends as purposefully as a baby animal seeking its mother.
Once Leah had clothes tumbling around inside the dryer, the fridge stocked, and her suitcase stored in the garage, she turned her attention to her search for her birth parents.
So far, the only thing she’d decided concerning Trina and Jonathan was that she wanted to see them. Live and in person. In order to accomplish that, she needed a current address.
She placed a call to her Misty River real estate agent. After what felt like more than enough time exchanging empty pleasantries, but may not have been enough time (Leah never knew), Leah informed the older woman that she had a question.