“Yes, I know.” Her chin lifted, her voice lowered. “You’re doing your best to give them a fighting chance, Dr. Steele. I realize that.”
“I—”
“All I’m asking is that you let me do the same. I’ve talked to the physiotherapists. We’ve come up with some ideas we think will help motivate them. Kids are used to running, screaming, jumping. To be silent and quiet all the time isn’t necessarily healthy.”
Hard to argue with truth. Jared had seen the brooding set in, watched as the will to keep going faded when the painful treatments never seemed to end.
“There will still be periods of silence,” she assured him. “No one’s rest will be disrupted, I promise. Maybe they’ll rest even better.”
Jared had always left this end to Diana. He was a surgeon, used to shutting out emotions, cutting and piecing without really thinking about the patient as a person. In fact, Jared didn’t understand kids most of the time. Hadn’t really wanted to until Nicholas.
Now whenever he lifted a scalpel, the child on the table became the son he had to save.
“Fine.” He agreed so he could get away, stop being reminded. “You can try it your way for a week. But if it doesn’t work or if someone becomes disruptive, we go back to the way it was.”
“Of course.”
A helicopter broke the silence of the afternoon.
“I hate that sound.” Jared strode back to the desk to see what new damage had been done in a world where God seemed to have fallen asleep.
Two weeks later, after lunch, Glory climbed up the pathway from the beach feeling both refreshed and at ease.
“I love this ocean.”
“Oh, me, too.” Leilani poured sand out of her upturned shoe, grimaced.
“I don’t understand how you can live in a place like this and not spend every spare moment beside the sea, if not in it.”
“Maybe if I had hair like yours that dried in a beautiful wave, I would, but all I end up with is a frizzy mess that won’t stay put no matter what.” Leilani unwound the scarf on her head to prove her point.
“Okay then.” GloryAnn tilted her head to one side, thinking. “Maybe you should stop having perms.”
“And wear what—mop strings? My hair sticks out in all directions. Dr. Steele would send me home.”
“Ha! You’re irreplaceable. Is he always so—” GloryAnn remembered who she was talking to and bit off the adverb.
“Cranky?” Leilani giggled at her arched brow. “Well, if the shoe fits.” Mirth was edged out by a sad smile. “Ever since his family died.”
“He had a family? I mean, I heard he’d been married once, but—” Glory gulped. “What happened to his wife?”
“She died. Was killed, actually.” Leilani sat down on a big rock, pulled out her water bottle and took a sip. “Both Diana and Nicholas—their son. He was three years old.”
“Oh, how horrible!” A gush of sympathy overtook Glory. She wondered how Jared could bear to stay.
“That’s not all.” Leilani shoved her sunglasses onto the top of her head. “They were murdered.”
At first Glory thought it was some kind of crude joke, but Leilani’s frown was deadly serious. “What happened?”
“I don’t know if you remember—a few years back there was an uprising by rebels in Russia. They took some hostages, did some damage. It took armed forces to quell it.”
“I recall something about that.”
“A school was bombed, and a little boy who was badly injured was flown here for treatment. His name was Sam.” Leilani’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I was here the day they brought him in with his father, Viktor. Sam’s mother had been a teacher at the school, his siblings were students there. An entire family was gone—except for Sam and his dad.”
A pang of loss for this man she’d never met rippled deep. Glory knew too well what it was like to lose loved ones.
“Diana, Dr. Steele’s wife, felt Sam should be taken elsewhere, that he was too damaged for the grafting procedure.”
“She was a doctor?”
“A pediatrician. Dr. Steele is the boss, but she was the oil that kept everything running smoothly.” Leilani smiled. “In fact, you’re doing her job.”
Glory almost groaned. That explained Jared’s attitude. She’d waltzed in and begun changing everything his dead wife had organized.
“Anyway, Diana wanted to transfer Sam somewhere else, but by then Dr. Steele had done the procedure many times with great success and felt he could help. He’d heard their story, you see, and it touched him. He understood Viktor was going through a father’s worst nightmare. Jared desperately wanted to give Viktor back his son.”
“So he did the procedure.” A sense of dread hung in the air.
“It went perfectly. Two days later, Sam died.”
“Oh, no.”
“It was horrible.” Leilani’s voice dropped. “Jared couldn’t understand it. There was no warning, no sign that the boy was in trouble. Even the autopsy couldn’t explain why, only that his little heart had stopped.”
“The father was devastated,” she guessed.
“And furious.”
“Oh?”
“Viktor agreed to bring Sam to Agapé because a doctor in Moscow had told him of our success. Viktor wasn’t a religious man himself, but he thought his son would do better among those who believe in the power of God.” Leilani pursed her lips. “You know how people are—get God on your side and you’ll get a double benefit—less risk of anything going wrong if God’s involved.”
“I’m familiar with that line of thinking.” Glory pieced together the sad story. “I’m guessing his view changed with Sam’s death?”
“Yes. Viktor claimed Jared had talked him into it, said he would never have allowed his son to undergo the treatment if he’d known it was so dangerous.” Leilani shook her head. “He’d been told all the risks. I was there, I heard it.”
“The poor man. To lose that last link—” Sadness overwhelmed her.
“After the autopsy Viktor took Sam’s body back to Russia to be buried. Before he left he threatened to make Jared pay for killing his son. It was an awful time. We’d all fallen for the little sprite, you see. Sam was a heartbreaker. We prayed so hard for him to be whole again.” A tear trembled on her lashes.
“It’s hard to understand sometimes, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Leilani sighed. “But nobody took it harder than Jared. He locked himself in his office, reviewed the tapes of the surgery over and over, searching for something he’d done wrong. Only there wasn’t anything. I should know—I assisted him. It was a straightforward surgery. It was difficult, yes, but no more so than others we’d done.”
“Those are the hardest cases to deal with—the ones where you can’t figure out how you could have prevented it. Or accept that you couldn’t.”
Leilani’s sad eyes brimmed with tears.
“Diana and Nicholas were traveling home from a visit with her parents a month later. Have you met Kahlia and Pono yet?”
Glory shook her head.
“Lovely people. They adored Diana and the baby. And Jared. Typical