Chapter 1 - THE NIGHT HE CHOSE THE WRONG HAND—AND FOUND HIS WIFE DYING
The elevator doors opened at 9:47 p.m., and Nathan Mercer would spend the rest of his life wishing he had let go of Vanessa Whitmore’s hand one second earlier.
Not because of the photographers near the lobby windows.
Not because Vanessa’s fingers were deliberately threaded through his.
Not even because, to anyone watching, they looked exactly like what half of Charlotte already suspected they were.
Lovers.
Nathan remembered only the hospital gurney rushing out of the elevator.
Two nurses pushed it at a run while a surgeon in blue scrubs shouted ahead for the operating room to be ready.
Nathan stepped aside automatically.
Then he saw the woman on the gurney.
Dark hair spilled across a white pillow.
An oxygen mask covered most of her face.
Her skin was so pale it seemed almost translucent beneath the hospital lights.
His wife.
“Claire?”
The name came out of him like something breaking.
Claire Mercer turned her head.
Her gray eyes found him immediately.
For one terrible second, Nathan thought he saw relief.
Then her gaze dropped.
To his arm.
To Vanessa.
To their joined hands.
The relief disappeared.
She did not cry.
She did not accuse him.
She did not even look surprised.
That was what destroyed him.
Claire simply looked as if the last question she had ever had about their marriage had finally been answered.
Her fingers loosened over the sheet.
Something small slipped from her hand and fluttered onto the polished floor.
Then the gurney passed through the double doors marked SURGERY.
“Claire!”
Nathan ripped his hand away from Vanessa and ran after her.
The surgeon turned before the doors closed.
“Are you her husband?”
“Yes.”
Nathan barely recognized his own voice.
“What happened? What’s wrong with her?”
The doctor’s expression changed.
Not softer.
Worse.
“Her aortic valve has failed, and there is evidence of an acute tear in the ascending aorta. We have minutes, Mr. Mercer. Not hours.”
Nathan stared at him.
“She needs surgery?”
“She needs surgery now.”
“Then do it.”
“We are.”
Nathan tried to move forward.
The doctor stopped him with one hand.
“I asked your wife in the elevator who we should contact.”
Nathan’s mouth went dry.
“She said there was no one.”
The surgeon glanced behind him.
Nathan followed his eyes.
Vanessa was still standing there in her white evening dress.
Still holding the little silver purse into which she had slipped Nathan’s phone twenty minutes earlier.
The surgeon looked back at Nathan.
“She said her husband was probably busy.”
Then the doors shut.
Nathan stood there.
For the first time in twenty years, fear stripped him of every defense he had ever built.
His wife might die behind those doors.
And she had gone in believing he had chosen another woman.
Nathan slowly looked down.
A dried white flower lay near his shoe.
Except it was not white anymore.
Its petals had faded to the brown-gold color of old paper.
He bent down and picked it up.
A gardenia.
Pressed flat.
Two years old.
From their wedding.
And suddenly Nathan Mercer was fifteen again.
Sitting in another surgical waiting room.
Holding a bouquet of gardenias for his mother.
Waiting for a father who never came.
Nathan’s mother, Rose, had loved gardenias.
Before her heart surgery, he had saved three weeks of summer-job money to buy her a bouquet. He had sat beneath the fourth-floor window of the old hospital wing for nine hours while the flowers wilted across his knees.
His father had promised he would come.
He never did.
Daniel Mercer had been across town with another woman.
Rose died shortly after midnight.
A nurse had walked into the waiting room and asked fifteen-year-old Nathan whether there was an adult she could call.
That night, Nathan made himself a promise.
He would never become the kind of man who left his wife alone in a hospital while he held another woman.
May you like
Twenty-three years later, he had done exactly that.
He pressed the brittle gardenia between his fingers and closed his eyes.
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