Fortune by Annabel Joseph (ebook reader for comics TXT) 📕

to change in the fall. Ryan wanted to tell them all, warn them to say what they needed to say before Thursday, but their stolid Russian hope was too formidable. He couldn’t say the words.

Even with Kat he kept the secret. He let her believe there was hope because to do otherwise would hurt her too much. Afterward he would hold her and comfort her. If she didn’t blame him.

If they all blamed him he couldn’t live with himself. It was hard enough to do what he did, deal in procedures and prognoses that were, more often than not, based on a tilting fulcrum of chance and luck. The fortunate survived and the unfortunate didn’t. He lived with it every day. There was really no bargaining with errant human cells and he’d long ago stopped trying. But this was the first time in his career that he truly wished he could bargain something away.

But not her. He wouldn’t have given her up even for this. He let her have the cranes because he had to, but in his heart they were still all for her. For her soul, her heart, her happiness. And his happiness, which he truly believed was somehow tethered to hers.

All too soon Thursday arrived. He went into the surgery determined to do his very best work. If there was a way to save Kat’s father he would find it. He was prepared. He was stone. His hands didn’t shake as he patted Dmitri’s shoulder and murmured words he didn’t even remember to a man who wasn’t totally there. For a while the surgery went well and Ryan started to feel guardedly hopeful. But then things began to go not-so-well. He knew the moment he started to lose him and then his hands began to shake.

Again the sickening slide of helplessness. But I’m trying. I’m trying my very best. Why won’t this work? Dmitri began to seize on the table. The machines shrieked and beeped their inhuman warnings, as if Ryan wouldn’t know there was trouble without their prompting. He knew he was losing him. He knew.

The trauma team jumped in and Ryan was pushed to the side, to the outskirts of the drama. His role was done now. If it had been a normal surgery he would have left the room, gone back to his office and made notes. Unsuccessful. He would have enumerated the steps he took to excise the tumor, the advent of the seizures, the quadrant and locus of the fatal bleed. The wheres and whys. But not this time, not yet. This time he stayed and watched as if in a dream as they worked on his lover’s father. He watched Dmitri code, come back and code again. He watched until the team desisted, removed their gloves and called it. And still he stayed and watched as they sewed him back up. He wanted to apologize. He wished he had said goodbye to Dmitri before they put him under. He wished he had told him how much he respected him, that he was a good man with a treasure of a family. He wondered how he could go back in the waiting room and face them all.

He had to change into clean scrubs before he went to give them the news.

* * * * *

Kat sat hunched among her sisters and her mother. The husbands minded the children, shuttling them back and forth to the bathrooms and vending machines as needed. None of them spoke. The time for prayers and panic was over. For now, it was out of their hands. Based on the location of the tumors and the insidious nature of the particular type of cells, Ryan had put the likelihood of success—survival—at fifty-fifty. Kat knew with some sixth sense that he was inflating the actual chances. But she tried not to think of that. She tried to think of a thousand cranes, good fortune, a wish.

I wish, I wish. I wish for my father to smile at me again, to call me princess just one more time.

As soon as the door opened, as soon as she saw Ryan’s drawn, blank affect, her wishes disintegrated into dust. Elena’s soft, choked sob was somehow worse than her sisters’ howls of mourning.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, spreading his hands. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t… We lost him. The tumor was too…”

His voice was tight. He shuddered a little, so slightly, but Kat saw it.

“He’s gone. I’m sorry. There was always a risk. The tumor was—” His hands fell at his sides, helpless. “I’m so sorry.”

Her sisters fell on Elena and wept. The husbands cried silently in that stolid manner men have, still tending the children with the robotic efficiency of necessity. A searing pain crippled Kat so that she couldn’t move. Gone. How could he be gone just like that?

Ryan still stood across the room, the deliverer of doom. The interloper. She knew she should go to him and tell him it was okay, that it wasn’t his fault. That he shouldn’t be sorry for trying to help them. Some impulsive realization reached her through all the pain and shock. Just as he turned to go, she flew across the room and caught his arm.

He looked down at her. There was a tension in the arm she held, a fathomless cast to his dark gaze. He cupped her face. “I’m sorry, doll. I tried.” His hand dropped away and he moved again to the door. “I can’t stay. I have to finish his chart.”

After he left, after they completed the excruciating exercise of saying goodbye to Dmitri’s body, Kat went home with her family. The house had a feeling of quiet unreality. As she walked through the rooms it felt as if she were trespassing in another family’s home. And Dmitri’s small TV room, with his worn recliner… No one could bear to go near it. His absence haunted them like a ghost.

Ryan’s absence haunted her too. He didn’t come, not even