I frowned, pulling it out. It was a thick stack of folded, heavy-stock papers.
My breath hitched as I smoothed them over the blanket. They were medical bills. The logo at the top was embossed: St. Jude’s Memorial Hospital. I scanned the numbers, my brain refusing to comprehend the math. The amounts were staggering—forty thousand, eighty thousand, topping out at over a hundred and forty thousand dollars in past-due notices. They were all billed to an adult guarantor, but the name was blanked out.
My eyes darted frantically across the page, looking for an explanation, for an illness I had somehow missed. But it was the department listed at the top right corner of the invoice that made the room violently spin out of control.
Department: Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
Before my short-circuiting brain could even process the syllables of the words, my cell phone buzzed violently on the wooden nightstand. I jumped, dropping the papers. The caller ID flashed a local number I didn’t recognize. I answered it, my voice barely a raspy whisper.
“Hello?”
“Is this the mother of Ethan Miller?” a crisp, professional woman’s voice asked.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“This is St. Jude’s Memorial Hospital, Ma’am. You need to come down here immediately. There’s been a severe complication, and your son is refusing to leave the ward.”
The walls of my fragile, carefully constructed life began to collapse inward, burying me in the rubble.
Chapter 2: Blood and Diamonds
The drive to the hospital was a chaotic blur of neon streetlights bleeding through the glass and the frantic, rhythmic slapping of my windshield wipers against a sudden, violent spring downpour. My hands gripped the steering wheel of my beat-up sedan so hard my knuckles were white. Neonatal. The word echoed in my skull like a funeral bell.
I parked illegally in the emergency drop-off zone, tossing my keys into my purse, and sprinted through the sliding glass doors. The hospital smelled intensely of industrial bleach, bitter coffee, and sterile despair.
“Ethan Miller,” I gasped to the triage receptionist, a young woman who looked thoroughly bored. “I got a call. He’s… he’s in the NICU?”
