Let It Be Me by Becky Wade (top young adult novels .TXT) 📕

very same person she’d been before the DNA results. Her truest identity, the only one that would last, was anchored in Christ and no one could take that from her. She’d spent hours preaching that truth to herself these past weeks. . . .

She only wished it had sunk in better.

She inclined her head, closed her eyes, and determinedly prayed the words she clung to every time bad news confronted her. I’m going to trust in you with all my heart and lean not on my understanding. In all my ways, I’ll acknowledge you. Please make my paths straight.

Lifting her head, she consciously relaxed the muscles tension had seized.

Who were the parents she should have been given to on the day of her birth? What had happened to the baby who should have been given to Leah’s mom and dad? And what chain of events had sent two babies home with the wrong parents?

CHAPTER THREE

Surgery days were Sebastian’s best days.

He entered the operating suite at Beckett Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, an undercurrent of adrenaline sharpening his concentration more effectively than coffee. Markie, registered nurse and physician’s assistant, came forward to help him slip on his sterile surgical gown and gloves. He’d already scrubbed in and put on his surgical cap, mask, and the loupes that magnified and enhanced his view of the field.

“Good afternoon,” he said to the team.

“Good afternoon,” they replied as a group.

Sebastian assessed the monitors, then the progress already made. Today’s patient was three-week-old Mateo Peralta, who’d been flown in from Argentina for a ventricular repair on a heart approximately the size of a walnut. Mateo lay on the table with his eyes taped closed, head to the side, a ventilation tube in his trachea, tiny hands relaxed.

Sebastian prepared his surgical plans the way generals strategized complex battles. Even so, he sometimes altered his plans when he saw his patient’s anatomy with his own eyes. Echocardiograms had grown more and more sophisticated, but there was still no substitute for looking into a chest.

Now that he was viewing the boy’s heart, he was indeed going to adjust his plan of attack. He asked for his instruments. “Let’s get to work, people.” It was his customary phrase.

Markie shot back her customary response. “Some of us are already working.”

Smiling a little, he bent forward and began.

Sebastian and his mentors had several things in common. They were all persistent perfectionists, determined to execute their role flawlessly. They were also confident. Thick-skinned. Tough-minded. Ambitious.

Sebastian was unlike the rest of them in one key way, however. He’d been a foster kid, and because of that, his street smarts were wickedly sharp. In elementary school, if he took a toy from another kid and that kid cried, he hadn’t cared. Why should he care? He’d ended up with the toy. In middle school, he’d learned to defend himself with his fists. In high school and college, he’d used people to get ahead, he’d put his own interests first, and he’d bent every rule that didn’t suit him.

Plenty of people had called him ruthless, but no one had ever called him humble.

Then he’d graduated and begun his internship, followed by his residency, followed by his fellowships. Working on children’s hearts had a way of maturing a person. The job had taught him that no human or technological advance of the last century had the ability to improve on God’s ingenious design of the human heart.

Sebastian was not the architect of the heart. He was simply a very well-trained plumber. His goal today, and every day, was to restore defective hearts as close as possible to God’s blueprint. The more effectively he could do that, the better and faster his patient would recover.

The phone rang. Dave, the anesthesiologist, answered, then murmured to the caller.

Sebastian continued without pause, his attention fixed on closing the hole between the left and right ventricles. The heart-lung bypass machine hummed, doing the work of both the heart and the lungs during surgery by pumping the infant’s blood through his body. The less time Mateo was on bypass, the better, so Sebastian had to make the right decisions, and he had to make them fast.

He also had to think two, six, eight steps ahead. The best surgeons possessed more than knowledge and skillful hands. They possessed feel. In this line of work, disaster was usually the result of several minor mistakes instead of a major one. He was learning to recognize subtle patterns and anticipate every way in which things could go wrong.

“A baby with transposition of the great arteries has been delivered in Macon,” Dave said to him, holding the phone against his chest. “His name’s Josiah Douglas. Fourteen hours old, eight pounds. They’re transporting him here by ambulance.”

Sebastian paused his stitching and looked up over his surgeon’s loupes. “Have they started him on prostaglandins?”

“Yes.”

“When will he arrive?”

“About an hour.”

He bent his head back to his task. His current repair was progressing like poetry.

Josiah would need a septostomy procedure today. Then, after giving him a week or so to recover and grow, an arterial switch operation.

The Clinic for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Diseases here at Beckett Memorial was one of the most prestigious in the country, alongside Boston Children’s, the Cleveland Clinic, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and the University of California San Francisco.

The surgical team and the pediatric intensive care team here ran an extremely successful defense against death. They’d do whatever they could to ensure that they did not lose Mateo. Or Josiah.

Not today, God.

Not on my watch.

When Sebastian entered Josiah’s room that evening, a distinctive, now-familiar energy closed around him. None of the energy originated with the boy, who lay unconscious on his warming bed. All of it came from the bright, hard-working machines sustaining his life.

Josiah’s light brown hair lay against his round head at strange angles. He had big cheeks and a small mouth.

As Sebastian stood at his bedside, feeling his tiredness, an image of Leah slipped into his mind. He