Chapter 10: What the Glass Showed

Wylie's POV

At one in the morning, the family waiting room was full of people who were not family.

Board members in dinner clothes, a priest, two women from the foundation with a casserole.

My stepmother sat in the middle of them with a tissue pressed to her mouth.

She had been crying since eleven, and she was good at it.

I had never once noticed that before tonight.

"She's so brave," a woman whispered.

"Colleen holds this family together," another said. "After everything she's been through."

My father paced the carpet with his hands behind him.

I had signed the foundation's checks for ten years, and I could not stand to sit in that room.

I took the stairs to the observation gallery.

It was a narrow glass box above operating room three, with six seats and no one in them but Dr. Shirley.

She sat at the front with her hands clasped between her knees.

She still wore the dress she'd worn to dinner, with a hospital coat over it.

She didn't look around.

"Sit down, Mr. Pemberton," she said. "You're blocking the glass."

"Wylie."

"You're blocking the glass, Wylie."

I sat one seat away from her.

Below us, the surgeon from Cleveland worked with her head bowed.

She was a short woman with grey in her braid, and she did not hurry once.

Lacey lay on the table, so small under the drapes that I looked away.

"How bad is it?" I asked.

"She's on bypass. The heart is stopped and the team is rebuilding the outflow."

"Is that normal?"

"It's the plan."

She said it flat, but her lips moved while she watched.

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