She’d decided to place the idea of a boyfriend on the shelf and simply go without. She was proud of that choice in the same way that she was proud of herself for going without the type of luxuries that had the power to destroy her monthly budget.
She wasn’t fated to fall in love. She’d made peace with that.
And yet, here she was: sitting on this lakeshore during her vacation, envisioning Sebastian Grant rowing a boat toward her.
She’d been very aware of her powerful responses to him the times they’d met at Magnolia Avenue Hospital and at the Colemans’ barbecue. Her reactions to him had been different than anything she’d experienced before. Even so, she’d expected them to prove fleeting.
Instead, a peculiar thing had occurred. An unprecedented thing. It had been more than two weeks since she’d seen him, yet her conscious and unconscious mind returned to him often. If anything, her draw toward him was intensifying.
Had she reached a hasty conclusion when she’d determined that she wasn’t capable of feeling the way other women felt?
No self-respecting mathematician ever trusted a hasty conclusion. So, if that’s what had happened here, she’d made an error.
Admittedly, her data set of romantic interactions was small. In order to test her conclusion about her wiring, she’d need to enlarge that data set. To do that, she’d need to see Sebastian again.
She had no expectation of acquiring Sebastian as a boyfriend. For one thing, he’d given her no reason to think he liked her in that way. For another, Ben was romantically interested in her, and Sebastian was his best friend. So even if Sebastian did like her inthat way, nothing could come of it.
Which was actually ... freeing.
She could talk with Sebastian, measure her responses, and indulge her curiosity without worrying that he might get the wrong idea.
The following night before leaving the hospital, Sebastian drew to a halt at Isabella Ackerman’s bedside.
He’d told Isabella’s parents that he expected their daughter to make it through surgery, and she had.
Isabella occupied the same room Josiah Douglas had occupied weeks ago. Before and after Josiah, numerous other babies had been treated in this room. As soon as they discharged one, others always arrived.
Josiah had been a full-term newborn. Tiny Isabella weighed less than six pounds. A cap covered her bald head. Long eyelashes rested against the ivory skin of her face.
Outwardly, she looked like a perfectly formed preemie. Her exterior didn’t reveal her life-threatening interior flaw.
Megan, Isabella’s mother, had told him they were trusting God to give their daughter a new heart. But Sebastian knew that onein four babies in need of a transplant would die before a donor organ could be found.
He pushed the thought from his head.
When Megan had asked him if he was a believer, he’d said that he was. Which was true. Yet his history with God was not clear-cut.
He’d had zero familiarity with God during his early years. Then the worst thing that could have happened to him—his only parent’s death—had happened. He’d landed with Christian foster parents who’d taken him to church. There, people had occasionally said things to him like “God’s ways are mysterious.” Or “God is with you in your grief.”
He hadn’t believed in God’s existence, so Christianity had seemed like an idiotic waste of time. But even if he had believed God existed, he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with a supposedly all-powerful God who could have kept his mother alive and hadn’t. Mostly, the idea of God made him angry.
Then he’d been forced to take a scholarship slot on a junior high mission trip to El Salvador, which had only made him angrier. Their group had just finished running a kids’ sports camp for the day when a counselor had asked him and a few others to return equipment to a nearby building. He’d been carrying stacks of orange cones through a basement hallway when the earthquake hit and everything had gone black.
The floor and walls jerked and jerked. Terror subsumed him.Escape. Get out!
A girl was panting and gasping behind him.
Dropping the cones, he stumbled toward the dim light ahead. His shoulder rammed into the wall. Dust rattled over him, clogging his nose and mouth.Why won’t it stop?
A hand wrapped around Sebastian’s forearm and yanked him forward, then forward again. He staggered into a small central room where two hallways met. Rectangular windows at sidewalk level above revealed the scene. A kid named Luke had pulled him out. Ben and Natasha stared at him with terrified eyes, their arms spread for balance as they fought to stay upright.
The building groaned and metal screamed. Pieces of the ceiling crashed down. Two of the room’s concrete walls collapsed inward, crashing into each other and forming a tent shape above their heads.
His heart roared.We’re going to die.
He’d continued to believe that for every one of the eight days he’d spent underground. Ben, Natasha, Genevieve, and Luke had families who loved them and were desperate for their safe return. Next to them, he was the broken toy nobody wanted.
We’re going to die.
