CHAPTER 4
The sight inside Room 247 shattered every defensive wall I had spent forty-four years building around my cold, cynical heart. A tiny boy lay swallowed by the massive hospital bed, his small chest rising and falling in violent, desperate gasps under a plastic oxygen mask.
Theodore had my dark, wavy hair and Sienna’s delicate features, his porcelain skin flushed with a dangerous, burning fever. Plastic tubes coiled around his tiny wrists, connected to chirping monitors that flashed warning lights in the dim room.
"Theo," I whispered, stepping toward the bed as if approaching a sacred, fragile miracle that might disappear if I moved too quickly.
I reached out with a trembling hand, gently curling my index finger into his tiny, hot fist. His dark eyes flickered open weakly through heavy lids, his gaze locking onto mine with an innocent, trusting curiosity that wiped away my breath.
"Dada?" he rasped faintly beneath the plastic mask, his tiny fingers feebly tightening around my thumb.
A suffocating wave of grief and fierce, protective rage hit me so hard I had to grab the steel bed railing to keep from falling. I had missed his first steps, his first word, his first laugh, all because I was terrified of being the flawed father my own parent had been.
"I'm here, buddy," I sobbed, leaning down to press a tender kiss against his fever-hot forehead. "Daddy is right here, and I am never, ever letting go again."
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The chief pediatrician stepped up beside me, handing me a stylus and an electronic consent pad displaying complex medical release documents.
"We need to move him to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit now, Mr. Van Doran," the doctor said urgently. "If we don't stabilize his airway within the next twenty minutes, severe lung damage is inevitable."
