Chapter 4 - What We Almost Missed
"I didn't notice," he said.
I looked at the empty bassinet. "Neither did I."
"You'd barely given birth."
"I was her mother."
"You'd just gone through thirty-six hours of labor."
"I should have seen her."
He shook his head. "No. I should have. I was taking pictures of Jasper."
Our son's name sounded strange in that room. Not because I loved him any less. Because everyone had been saying it all afternoon — Jasper this, Jasper that, the Kessler heir, the future of the family. Nobody had asked whether Wren was warm. Nobody had noticed she'd stopped moving.
Except Renee.
A doctor came in forty minutes later. Dr. Osei. He pulled a chair up beside my bed, and something about that small courtesy terrified me more than anything else that day.
"Wren is stable."
The air left my lungs all at once. Wyatt grabbed my hand.
"Stable means what?"
"She's breathing with support. Her oxygen levels have come back up."
"Why did it happen?"
"A congenital heart defect. A narrowing near the pulmonary valve was restricting blood flow to her lungs."
"Will she need surgery?"
"Yes. Within the next twenty-four hours."
I closed my eyes. I'd known my daughter for less than a day, and already somebody wanted to open her chest.
Wyatt asked about success rates, recovery times, complications. Dr. Osei answered every one of them carefully. Then he looked at me.
"Nurse Renee caught the distress very early. That mattered."
"Would she have died?"
May you like
He paused. "If the drop in her oxygen had gone unnoticed much longer, the outcome could have looked very different."
Much longer. Five minutes? Ten? The exact stretch of time Dahlia had spent posing with Jasper while Wren lay silently going blue in the bassinet beside her?
