“I read that you actually stop the heart to do the procedure. That’s wild.”
“It’s necessary to remove the blood clots without affecting the pulmonary arteries. If I make a single scratch, his lungs will fill with blood and he’ll be gone. There’s a lot that can go wrong with this.”
“But it won’t,” she said confidently. “I believe in you.”
I dropped my gaze again.
“I know you’ll believe in yourself too…once this is done.”
I kept my gaze averted, keeping my heart low and calm.
“You’re so young. How did you do that many surgeries?”
My eyes flicked back to her. “When I was in residency, I took on as many surgeries as I could. I lived, breathed, and slept at the hospital. When everyone else went home and lived their lives, I stayed.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to be the best. I didn’t have my first fatality until after 250 surgeries.”
“Yeah, I saw that. When did you know you wanted to be a heart surgeon?”
“Always. It’s been a part of my identity since I can remember. I’ve always wanted to help people the way my dad does.”
Her eyes softened. “I can tell it’s your passion.”
“Sometimes people ask me what my second-choice occupation is, what I would be if I weren’t a heart surgeon,” I shook my head and gave a shrug. “The answer is, there is nothing else. I live and breathe for the heart. I busted my ass in medical school to be the best to get into the residency program at Johns Hopkins because only the top students get selected. I’m really close to my family, and there are many years that I didn’t really see them because I was so dedicated to what I was doing, but I made that sacrifice because it was important to me. It’s everything to me.”
Her eyes lingered on my face, like she could listen to me talk about it all day. “You’re going to go in there and kick ass, Dex.”
The chuckle that came from my lips was involuntary because I hadn’t expected her to say something like that. “Thanks.”
“You have no idea how excited I am to be a part of your world, to help you help people. It’s such an honor. Truly. I get paid to help you help people. That’s the best job ever.” Her eyes started to smile, her sincerity obvious.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.
“Sometimes, I think it was meant to be—that my doctor retired, that I came to the Trinity Building, that Cleo arranged this.”
I dropped my hand from my cheek and rested it on the surface of the desk, staring at her as I tried to decipher her meaning, unsure why she would think this moment was meant to happen. “Why do you say that?”
She looked down for a moment, tears visible under her eyelashes, bubbling up in size until they formed into drops and dripped down her cheeks. “Because…I was born with a hole in my heart, and a doctor saved my life.” She lifted her gaze and looked at me, her eyes wet. “My parents couldn’t afford the operation, and it bankrupted us. So…what you do means the world to me.”
It was the first time I stopped thinking about the surgery that was about to happen, and I focused on something else entirely—the woman sitting across from me. Now I understood why she believed in me so fiercely, why she pushed me to get back to work, why she was so passionate about a job someone else wouldn’t care about. My hand immediately moved forward, and I grabbed hers, thinking about someone opening her up and stopping her heart to pull a piece from one vessel to repair the atrial opening in her chamber, of the stress she and her family endured, not just about her well-being, but the financial fallout that it caused. Speechless, I just stared at her.
She squeezed my hand back, her damp eyes on me, looking at me like I was the one who’d fixed her, when I was just a young boy at the time. The relationship between a doctor and a patient was sacred, a connection so