Husband's Mistress Killed Wrong Girl in OR, Now He's Mourning His Real Sister novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Three in the Morning
The hospital calls about Kit, Mitchell promises to take care of it personally, and he comes out of the OR to say she is gone. A missed text proves the crash was meant for Mara's car.
My phone rang at 3:02 in the morning, and the screen said Metro General.
I was in my kitchen in my socks, because I had given up on sleep around midnight.
"Mrs. Bannister? This is the emergency department. Your sister Kit was in a car accident tonight."
I held onto the counter.
"She's awake and she's talking," the nurse said. "She's stable, but she's going to need surgery."
"I'm coming."
"Ma'am, you're listed as her emergency contact. Is there anyone else we should call?"
"No," I said. "I'll call my husband."
Mitchell was the head of neurosurgery at that hospital.
He answered on the first ring, wide awake, though he had told me at dinner he was off call tonight.
"Mitchell, it's me. Kit's in your ER. A car accident."
"Okay. Okay. Breathe, Mara." His voice was calm and sure. "I'll take care of it personally."
"You'll operate yourself?"
"I wouldn't let anyone else touch her. Drive carefully. I'll meet you there."
I cried in the car for the first three blocks.
Then I stopped, because I am an ICU nurse, and I have seen what happens to people who drive while they cry.
At Metro General, a woman at the desk walked me down a hallway to a waiting room with a vending machine and one flickering light.
"She's already in the operating room," the woman said. "Dr. Bannister's team has her."
"Is it bad?"
"She had a bleed on the brain. It's a common surgery. They do it every week."
I knew that. I had watched a hundred of those patients wake up in my unit and ask for ice chips.
So I sat down and waited, and I believed my husband.
At 4:15 a young surgeon in scrubs sat down beside me and put a paper cup in my hands.
"I'm Dr. Camilla Monaghan, Mitchell's chief resident," she said. "We've met at your Christmas party. I brought you tea, because the coffee here is a crime."
She was blonde and tired and kind.
She wore a navy fleece with the neurosurgery crest, much too big for her, and the sleeves covered her hands.
"Mitchell is the best I've ever worked with," she said. "Kit's lucky it's him."
"Thank you. Is she okay?"
"She's in the best hands in the city."
She spread a blanket over my knees from a stack by the window, and she did not leave me alone for a minute.
At 5:30 she was called away, and a man took her chair at the far end of the hall.
He was an anesthesiologist, thin and gray in the face, and he wore his wedding band on a cord around his neck.
He kept touching it through his scrub top.
He did not look at me and he did not look at the operating room doors.
At 6:50 the doors opened, and Mitchell came out alone.
He had his mask in his hand.
His eyes were red.
"Mara," he said.
I stood up so fast the blanket fell.
"No. No, she was stable. The nurse said so."
"The swelling was worse than we saw on the scan." He took my shoulders. "It got ahead of us. We did everything. She's gone, sweetheart. At 6:41."
My ears rang.
"She was awake when she came in," I said. "It was a routine evacuation. I've watched fifty of them."
"I know."
"Routine doesn't swell."
"Brain tissue doesn't care what's routine." His voice cracked. "Please. Don't do this to yourself. I'm so sorry."
He pulled me against his chest.
I let him.
His shirt smelled of the hospital soap and his heart was fast, and I thought: he is a man who just lost his sister-in-law.
Then I thought: he sounded so awake on the phone.
I did not say it.
I stood in my husband's arms in front of the nurses' station and let him hold me up.
Down the hall, the anesthesiologist was still in his chair, staring at the floor with his hand on his chest.
Dr. Monaghan put her hand over her mouth and turned away to cry.
I decided right there that I would not argue with Mitchell and I would not ask for anything.
I would count every word he said to me from now on.
"Can I see her?" I asked.
"They're preparing her now. Give them a little time. I'll have someone take you down."
He kissed my hair.
"Let me get your things from the ER. You shouldn't have to do that."
He came back with a clear plastic bag from the patient property desk and put it in my hands.
Kit's wallet, her bakery apron folded small, her cracked phone.
Mitchell went to find the funeral director's number and I walked outside alone.
The sky was going pink over the river.
I sat in my car in the parking garage and held Kit's apron against my face.
It smelled like cinnamon and she would never wear it again.
I went to turn off my phone, and I saw it.
I kept Do Not Disturb on for my day sleeping, and only my saved numbers could ring through.
Metro General was saved, because of Mitchell. Texts stayed silent.
There was one new message, from Kit, sent at 2:51 AM.
I had been standing in my kitchen with the phone in my hand when it came in, and it never made a sound.
"Nor, a black SUV has been behind your car since the bridge. I'm pulling over."
Your car.
Kit had been driving my car.
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