“I’m sorry. That had to be hard for you and your wife.”
Deep brown eyes seemed to bore into his, or was it just that he felt uncomfortable discussing the situation with his ex-wife with Sarah?
“And he’s okay now?” Sarah asked.
“He’s great. He’s done a lot of growing in the last three years. I keep a close watch on him and he still has a lot of follow-up testing that’s necessary, but so far he’s not shown any signs of rejection over the past three years.”
David watched her as Sarah bit down on her lip, an act that caught way too much of his attention.
“Can I ask you one more question?” she asked.
“Sure,” David said as he forced his eyes away from lips that looked way too dangerous right then.
“What did it feel like when you learned that there was a heart available for your son?” she asked, her eyes never wavering from his.
This was not the question he had expected. He had thought maybe she would want to know about the impact that a sick child had on someone’s life or how he had gotten through the awful waiting period. But this? That moment had to have been the most emotional moment of his life. How did you explain the feeling of being lifted from a pit of despair and given the chance of a new life?
“It’s hard to explain,” he said, not knowing where to start. Though it might seem like an easy question to answer to Sarah, it was far from it. Someone would have to understand where Davey was in his life at that time. “Davey had so many surgeries before he was finally put on the transplant list. With each surgery, I kept thinking this will be the last one. But it never was, and when he was almost two it was determined that the only thing that would save him would be a transplant. I knew the odds that he would receive one in time were against us. By the time I brought Davey here, his heart was failing and we were getting to the point where I was going to have to make some hard decisions on his care. I’d almost given up. I had walked out into the waiting room knowing that if there wasn’t a miracle I would lose my little boy within the next few days. Then one of the organ procurement staff found me and told me that there was a good chance that Davey would be getting a heart very soon. Learning that there was a heart available for my son was the happiest moment of my life. I don’t have another experience to compare it to. To have that hope of a future for your child when you are at the point of giving up is unimaginable. It was like going from the lowest point in your life to the happiest in two point five seconds and not knowing if you should laugh or cry.”
“I’m glad that it worked out that way, that you were given that chance.”
This was it. This was the moment she had been obsessed with over the last week. All she had to do was explain that she had been there that night and that she had suspicions that the case manager that night had been talking about her son when she had told David that there could be a heart available. All she had to do was open her mouth and the words would come, she knew they would.
“Hey, Sarah, Hannah’s here and wanted to know if you had a second to talk to her,” Melody said from the doorway.
She’d missed her chance.
Turning away from David she stood and headed toward the door before turning back. “Didn’t you say you’d like to meet Lindsey’s mother?” she asked.
“That’s okay,” David said, “I’m scheduled in surgery with Dr. Benton this afternoon.”
“Okay,” she said, then turned again toward the door before stopping a second time. “Did you say you wanted to come out to the ranch? This Saturday is therapy day for the kids enrolled in the program if you want to come and bring your son.”
“Yeah, Davey would love that.”
She could feel his searching eyes on her as she left the room. Instead of coming clean with David, she had just managed to make him think she was nosy. There had to be a better way to go about this. If only she didn’t feel that gut-wrenching pain when she thought of that night maybe she could. She’d asked David to share his personal experiences with her, but she’d been unable to share with him her own experiences that day.
She’d been working one on one with David for a week now helping him to understand her side of the cardiac practice and she’d been impressed with how well he interacted with both the young patients and their parents. He’d been up-front with the parents when they’d had concerns about their children’s diagnosis and risks of the many procedures that were necessary. She had no doubt that if it was David in her position that he would have come right out and told her.
But he hadn’t been through what she had been through that night, she reminded herself. His child had survived that night, hers hadn’t. Either way, she had to tell him. The next time she had an opportunity to tell David she’d do it, no matter how much it hurt.
David pulled his car off the highway and stared down the long dirt road. He’d been driving for almost an hour and had started to think he was lost.
“Are we there?” his son asked, trying to strain his neck to look over from his booster seat in the back of the car.
David looked at the metal sign hanging over the road that swung back and forth with the wind. He hadn’t expected anything this big when Lindsey had been telling him about the horses Sarah had at her house, but
