He Let Our Daughter Die to Save His Mistress Chapter 07

He Let Our Daughter Die to Save His Mistress Chapter 07

I wasn’t there. Ruth Delaney told me all of it later, in a deposition room, in the flat voice of a lawyer who has decided she is going to enjoy this.

“Today is your daughter’s funeral,” Eleanor said. “Eleven o’clock, St. Brigid’s chapel. And you’re sitting here peeling fruit for a whore.”

Sienna gasped. “Mrs. Ashford – you’ve known me since I was fifteen-”

“I have,” Eleanor said. “That’s the tragedy.”

Damien had gone the color of paper, but he still didn’t believe it. That’s the part I can’t get past. Even then.

“Stop,” he said. “Both of you, stop. Grace is lying. She hides Lily with you and then she tells me the kid’s dead so I’ll Grandmother, Lily had scratches. I saw her. I read her chart myself. I told the trauma team to take her

the second Sienna was closed.”

“Did you?” Eleanor said. “Or did you tell them to take her when the room was free? Because those are different sentences, Damien, and one of them is manslaughter.”

“She was stable-”

“She had a Grade IV liver laceration,” said the Chief of Staff, who had not spoken until then. “She was hemorrhaging into her abdomen for six hours and twenty minutes. Internal bleeding doesn’t show on the outside, Doctor. You taught that to interns.”

Damien sat down on the edge of the bed.

“The painkillers,” he said. “I never – someone asked me about her allergies, I cleared the morphine, I said she

was fine with it-”

Ruth opened her briefcase and put a tablet in his hands.

“Pharmacy audit,” she said. “Then the trauma bay cameras. Then bay four.”

He watched the pharmacy log first. Zero analgesic doses dispensed to patient ASHFORD, LILLIAN R., age 6,

across six hours.

Then the camera.

He watched his wife go down on her knees on the trauma bay floor and grab his scrubs.

He watched himself pull free and walk away.

He watched, at 4:31 a.m., a woman fold forward over a gurney and press her forehead to a small hand and.. stay there for eleven minutes without moving while nurses stepped around her.

watched them bring the sheet.

The tablet slid out of his hands onto the floor.

“Where is she,” he said.

“You don’t get to ask that,” Eleanor said.

Sienna reached for him. “Damien, sweetheart, this isn’t your fault. Different bodies react differently. Some children just don’t-”

“Don’t finish that sentence.” It came out of him like something breaking. “Even if you had ten children – a.

hundred – none of them would be Lily. Do you understand what I’ve done? Do you understand what I’ve done

to Grace?”

Ruth Delaney let that sit for exactly three seconds. She’s very good.

Then she said: “Dr. Ashford, we’ve spoken to Dr. Owen Pratt.”

Pratt was the second-year resident who ran the trauma bay board that night.

He was already downstairs in the Chief of Staff’s office with a lawyer of his own, and he had already told them everything, because a twenty-nine-year-old with two hundred thousand in loans folds in about nine

minutes.

Sienna Vaughn had approached him at 12:05 a.m. – before her own surgery – with forty thousand dollars in cash and a request. Keep the little girl’s pain scores charted low. No analgesia; she’s dramatic, she’s fine. And

whatever you do, don’t let her go into that room before me.

Pratt had also confirmed something else, which is the detail that ended it: Sienna’s injuries had been

superficial. A seatbelt contusion. A small subchorionic bleed. She did not need an emergency operating room.

She had told him to make her look like she did.

She bought the room. She bought the silence. She bought six hours.

And then, four days later, she paid a private physician eight thousand dollars to come to the house and say

that a child’s ashes were a medical hazard.

Damien turned around very slowly to look at the woman in the bed.

“Why,” he said.

And Sienna Vaughn, who is not stupid, understood that the room had turned, and did what she has always.

done.

She started to cry.

“Because I love you,” she said. “Because that woman had everything of mine, and I couldn’t-”

“Not that.” His voice was almost gentle. “Not the room. The baby.”

Ruth Delaney took a second folder out of her briefcase and set it on the blanket.

“Blood type,” she said. “Non-invasive paternity, run Tuesday from the sample the OB lab drew on admission. You’ll want to sit down for this part, Doctor.”