Kristin Hannah's Family Matters 4-Book Bundle: Angel Falls, Between Sisters, The Things We Do for Love, Magic Hour Read Free Page A

youthful dream aside and turned his attention to medicine. If he wasn’t talentedenough to entertain people with his hands, he believed he was caring enough to heal them.
    He studied day and night, knowing that a quiet man like him, so reserved and ordinary, needed to be better than the competition.
    He graduated at the top of his class and took a job that stunned and appalled his Ivy League classmates—at an AIDS clinic in the Bronx. It was the early days of the epidemic and people were terrified of the disease. But Liam believed that there, amidst true suffering, he would discover the man he was meant to be.
    In hallways that smelled of death and despair, he made a difference in patients’ lives, but he never once got to say “You’ll be fine. You’re cured.”
    Instead, he dispensed medicines that didn’t work and held hands that got weaker and weaker. He held newborn babies who would never have the chance to dream of living in Paris. He wrote out death certificates until he could no longer hold a pen without horror.
    When his mother died of a sudden heart attack, he came home and tended to the father who, for the first time, needed his only son. Liam had always meant to leave again, but then he’d met Mikaela …
    Mike
.
    With her, at last, he had found his place in the world.
    Now he was in the hospital, waiting to hear whether she would live …
    They had been here for only a few hours, but it felt like forever. His children were in the waiting room—he could picture them, huddled together, weeping, Jacey drying her little brother’s tears—and though he longed to be with them, he knew that if he looked at his children now, he would break, and the tears that fell from his eyes would scald them all.
    “Liam?”
    He spun toward the voice. His hip cracked into a crash cart and set the supplies rattling. He reached out and steadied them.
    Dr. Stephen Penn, the chief of neurology, stood before him. Though he was Liam’s age—just turned fifty—Stephen looked old now, and tired. They had played golf together for years, he and Stephen, but nothing in their relationship had prepared them for this moment.
    He touched Liam’s shoulder. “Come with me.”
    They walked side by side down the austere corridor and turned into the ICU. Liam noticed the way the trauma nurses wouldn’t look at him. It was humbling to know how it felt to be the “next of kin.”
    At last they entered a glass-walled private room, where Mikaela lay in a narrow bed, behind a pale privacy curtain. She looked like a broken doll, hooked up to machines—ventilators, IVs, monitors that tracked everything from her heart rate to her intracranial pressure. The ventilator breathed for her, every breath a rhythmic
thwop-whoosh-clunk
in the quiet room.
    “The … 
her
brain is functioning, but we don’t know at what level because of the meds.” Stephen produced a straight pin and poked Mikaela’s small, bare feet, saying nothing when she failed to respond. He conducted a few more tests, which he knew Liam could assess along with him. Quietly he said, “The neurosurgeon is on board and up to speed, just in case, but we haven’t identified anything surgical. We’re hyperventilating her, controlling her pressure and temperature. Barring development of any bleeding … well, you know we’re doing everything we can.”
    Liam closed his eyes. For the first time in his life, he wished he weren’t a doctor. He didn’t want to understand the reality of her condition. They had a state-of-the-art medical center and some of the best doctors north of San Francisco, all drawn here by the quality of life. But the truth was, there wasn’t a damn thing that could be done for her right now.
    He didn’t mean to speak, but he couldn’t seem to hold it all inside. “I don’t know how to live without her …”
    When Stephen turned to Liam, a sad, knowing expression filled his eyes. For a split second, he wasn’t a specialist, but just a man, a