PART 1
“If you don’t sign right now, when my son dies I’m going to tell everyone that you let him die.”
That was the very first sentence my mother-in-law spat at me at three thirty in the morning, inside a brightly lit hospital waiting area in Atlanta, Georgia, while my husband lay unconscious in intensive care and a disheveled young woman in silk pajamas wept beside my father-in-law.
I was still wearing the faded grey hoodie I had grabbed in a rush when leaving our house. Twenty minutes earlier, a emergency call had informed me that Christopher had arrived by ambulance with dangerously low blood pressure, severe arrhythmia, and crushing chest pain. All the paramedic could tell me was that they had picked him up at a residential apartment in the Midtown district.
That specific detail had immediately made me uneasy, because Christopher had assured me just a few hours prior that he was attending an important dinner with corporate suppliers over in Buckhead.
When I hurried through the sliding glass doors, Brenda and Walter, my in-laws, surrounded me before I could even catch my breath. The physician on duty stepped forward and explained that they suspected an acute aortic dissection and wanted to wheel him into emergency surgery immediately.
“Sign right here,” the doctor told me, thrusting a clipboard and a heavy pen into my hands.
