Chương 12 - The Waiting Room of PurgatoryThe private family waiting room on the eighth floor was designed to look like a luxury hotel suite, but to me, it felt like an executioner’s antechamber.
Grace was sitting across the room on a grey velvet sofa, staring blankly out the reinforced glass window at the foggy Boston harbor below. The twin girls were asleep on an adjoining sofa, curled up under matching pink blankets that a nurse had brought in an hour earlier.
I walked over quietly, holding two paper cups of black coffee, and set one down on the low oak table in front of her.
“You should drink something,” I murmured, sitting down on the opposite end of the sofa, keeping a respectful, cautious distance.
Grace didn't look at the coffee. She didn't move her head. Her voice, when she finally spoke, sounded hollowed out by years of chronic, bone-deep exhaustion.
“When Leo was two years old,” Grace began, her eyes still locked on the grey fog outside, “he woke up in the middle of the night screaming in pain. His little legs were covered in purple bruises from just crawling across the carpet. I didn't have a car. I didn't have insurance that covered emergency pediatric care because your corporate lawyers had structured our divorce settlement to strip away my secondary coverage.”
My chest constricted violently. I swallowed hard, unable to find the breath to interrupt her.
“I wrapped him in a blanket,” Grace continued, a single tear cutting a clean path down her cheek. “I walked three miles through a Chicago blizzard to the county hospital holding him in my arms because I couldn't afford a taxi. While I was sitting on a plastic chair in a crowded waiting room watching my baby vomit blood... you were accepting an award for executive of the year at a black-tie gala downtown.”
She turned her head slowly then, looking at me with eyes so full of accumulated agony that it felt like physical blades piercing my skin.
“So don't talk to me about waiting rooms, Ryan. You’ve only been in one for twenty-four hours. I’ve been living in this purgatory for three agonizing years.”
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“I know,” I choked out, my voice breaking on the words. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees and burying my face in my hands. “I know I was a monster, Grace. A blind, arrogant, selfish monster. There are no excuses I can give you that will ever wash that away.”
“I don't want excuses, Ryan,” she whispered, her voice dropping into a devastating quiet. “I just want my son to live.”
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