“I’d moved to sleep on the floor so I could spread out a bit,” Donovan says as we move quickly through the darkness. “Something hit my leg hard enough to wake me up. When I opened my eyes, Kai was stumbling out of your bedroom and down the hall toward his room. I called out, but he didn’t respond, just kept moving like he couldn’t hear me.”
“How long ago?”
“Maybe ten minutes. I thought he was just going to the bathroom, so I went back to sleep. But then I heard a crash from his room.”
Ten minutes. Long enough that something might actually be wrong, but I push the thought aside and focus on getting to my son.
Kai’s door is closed. I push it open and find him collapsed on the floor beside his bed with pill bottles scattered around him and his face the color of ash. His chest is barely moving, and when I drop to my knees beside him and press my fingers to his neck, his pulse is fast and irregular under my touch.
I call Dr. Morrison, dialing while I check Kai’s airway and breathing. His lips have a bluish tint that I don’t like, and his breathing is shallow and labored.
I grab the pill bottle nearest to his hand and read the label. Medication for arrhythmia. Prescribed to someone named David Piper, not Kai Hale.
He’s been hiding this. Taking medication under a fake name. For how long?
“Dr. Morrison is on his way,” Donovan says, kneeling on Kai’s other side. “What can I do?”
“Help me get him on his side in case he vomits. And get me pillows to keep him elevated.”
We work together to position Kai in the recovery position, and I keep my fingers on his pulse because I need to know his heart is still beating, even if the rhythm is wrong. Donovan returns with pillows, and we prop Kai’s upper body at an angle that should help his breathing.
“What happened to him?” Donovan asks, and I hear the fear underneath his controlled tone.
“Heart condition he’s been hiding from us.” I hold up the pill bottle. “Fake name on the prescription. He’s been managing this alone instead of telling anyone.”
Donovan’s jaw tightens. “How long?”
“I don’t know. But long enough that he needed medication strong enough to require a prescription.”
Kai’s breathing changes, becomes more labored, and I lean closer to his face. “Kai. Can you hear me? You need to stay with us.”
No response. His eyes stay closed, and his chest struggles with each breath.
Dr. Morrison arrives twenty minutes later, moving quickly through the door with his medical bag and no questions about why I called him at three in the morning. He’s been our estate doctor for fifteen years and knows better than to waste time on questions when I say it’s an emergency.
He drops beside Kai and immediately starts his examination, checking vitals and listening to his heart with a stethoscope while I move back to give him room to work. His face grows progressively more serious as he works, and when he picks up the pill bottle I found, he looks at me with grim understanding. “How long has he been taking this?”
“I don’t know. We just found him like this.”
Dr. Morrison pulls out more equipment from his bag and hooks Kai up to a portable heart monitor. The irregular beeping fills the room, a visual confirmation of what I already knew.
“Ventricular arrhythmia,” he says, studying the readout. “Severe. He needs to be in a hospital with a cardiac unit immediately.”
“The storm’s picked up again,” Donovan says from behind me. “Helicopter can’t fly in these conditions, and the roads are still impassable.”
Dr. Morrison’s expression hardens. “Then we stabilize him here and hope it’s enough. Help me get him to the medical wing. I need proper equipment.”
We lift Kai carefully between the three of us and carry him through the hallways to the estate’s medical facility. It’s equipped better than most small clinics, but it’s not a hospital, and it’s not designed for cardiac emergencies of this severity.
Dr. Morrison works efficiently, starting an IV and hooking Kai up to more comprehensive monitoring equipment while explaining what he’s doing in clipped medical terms that I only half understand. What I do understand is that my youngest son’s heart is failing, and we’re stuck on a mountain with limited resources.
“If we’d found him any later, he’d be dead,” Dr. Morrison says as he injects medication through the IV line. “Another hour and his heart would have given out completely.”
The words hit me like a physical blow, but I keep my face neutral and my voice steady. “What’s his prognosis?”
“If I can stabilize the arrhythmia and get his heart back into a regular rhythm, he should survive. But he needs proper cardiac care as soon as possible. This condition didn’t develop overnight. He’s been dealing with this for months, maybe longer.”
“How long?” I ask.
