He Let Our Daughter Die to Save His Mistress Chapter 01

He Let Our Daughter Die to Save His Mistress Chapter 01

My husband is a heart surgeon.

Last night he had one operating room, one trauma team, and two patients.

One was his pregnant ex-girlfriend.

The other was our six-year-old daughter.

He chose the ex-girlfriend.

And then he told the nurses to hold the morphine.

I found out from a text message at 11:47 p.m. — Minor accident on the 90. Everyone’s fine. Don’t come. Sixteen minutes later I was standing in the trauma bay of Ashford Memorial, the hospital his family built, watching a nurse cut my daughter’s pink jacket off her body with shears.

Lily wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Sienna Vaughn had let her ride up front, because Lily wanted to see the storm, and Sienna wanted to be fun. When the truck hit them, my daughter went through the windshield.

Sienna stayed in her seat. Her belt held. It held so tightly it tore something inside her, and she bled a little, and she screamed a lot.

“Grace.” Damien came out of the double doors in scrubs, his gloves still on. My husband. Seven years of my life. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Where is she?”

“Bay four. She’s stable.”

“She’s not stable, she has free fluid in her abdomen, I saw the FAST scan.” I had been a fourth-year surgical resident once. I could still read a screen. “Damien. She’s bleeding into her belly. She needs the OR.”

“Sienna’s going in first.”

I heard the words. I understood every one of them, and still my brain refused to hold them.

The storm had shut down half the city. Two surgical teams were snowed in. There was one room, one attending, one anesthesiologist, and my husband was in charge of the board.

I got down on my knees. In front of the nurses, in front of the transport techs, in front of the vending machine that was still humming. I grabbed the hem of his scrub top.

“She’s six,” I said. “She’s forty-two pounds. She can’t lose that much blood. Please. Please let her go first. Ten minutes, Damien, that’s all — please.”

He looked down at me the way you look at something that got on your shoe.

“Sienna’s pregnant,” he said. “I save two lives instead of one. That’s math, Grace, not cruelty.”

“She’s your daughter.”

“And Lily’s already getting blood. She’ll be fine an hour from now.” He pulled his top out of my fist. “Try not to embarrass me in my own hospital.”

They took Sienna Vaughn in at 12:20 a.m.

They took my daughter in at 3:55 a.m.

She was dead at 4:31.

I know the exact minute because I was holding her hand when the line went flat, and I was the one who said, stop, because the resident kept doing compressions on a chest that had nothing left inside it to fill.

“I’m so sorry,” the trauma surgeon said. He wouldn’t look at me. “Massive intra-abdominal hemorrhage. The liver was shattered. Time was the only thing that could have saved her.”

I nodded. I was very calm. People always say I’m calm.

Then he said, “Mrs. Ashford — there’s something else. There were no analgesics in her chart. Not one dose. Six hours.”

The room tilted.

“She was awake for most of it,” he said quietly. “She was in pain the entire time.”

I had heard her crying through the curtain. I thought she was frightened. I told her, Be brave for a little longer, baby, Daddy’s coming.

She had been screaming because her body was tearing itself apart, and nobody gave her a single milligram, because the man who owned the trauma board said she was fine, just scratches, don’t waste anything on her.

At 5:15 a.m., a courier came into the family room with a shopping bag.

“Delivery for a Lily Ashford? Dr. Ashford ordered it.”

Inside were three bags of peanut M&M’s, still warm from somebody’s car heater.

My daughter had a peanut allergy severe enough to carry two EpiPens. Her father had never once been the parent who packed her lunch. He didn’t know.

I sat there holding candy that would have killed her anyway, and my phone lit up on the chair beside me.

Damien.

“Grace.” Impatient. Chewing something. “My grandmother just called me eleven times. Eleven. Are you seriously running to a ninety-one-year-old woman over a delayed surgery?”

“Damien—”

“I brought Lily to the hospital, didn’t I? I sent her candy — peanut ones, her favorite. What else do you want from me?” A pause. Water running. “I’m making Sienna’s dinner tray, she can’t keep anything down. Just take Lily into the OR when the room opens and stop calling me. I’ll cover the bill. Every penny.”

I looked at the gurney across the hall, at the small shape under the white sheet, at the one bare foot the nurses hadn’t covered yet.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll take her in.”

And I hung up on my husband for the first time in seven years.