Chapter 1 - The Sound of Breaking
The silence of the empty apartment was completely suffocating.
Ethan Cole sat on his velvet sofa, holding a glass of whiskey that he had no intention of drinking.
It was Friday night, and he was officially a divorced man.
He kept replaying the image of Claire slipping those six pages into her leather purse.
There had been no anger in her eyes, only a profound and terrifying exhaustion.
He tried to convince himself that she simply fell out of love with him.
He did not know that three miles away, Claire was currently fighting for her life.
She lay on the cold hardwood floor of her small rental apartment, clutching her chest in agony.
The blue file folder had spilled its contents across the rug, scattering her dark secrets.
Her heart, weakened by months of aggressive and hidden illness, was finally giving up.
She stared at the ceiling, wondering if Ethan felt a sudden chill in the air.
She closed her eyes, entirely ready to let the darkness consume her.
Suddenly, the wooden door of her apartment splintered open with a loud crash.
Her landlord had heard the heavy fall and rushed inside with a spare key.
Paramedics arrived less than five minutes later, filling the tiny room with chaotic energy.
They strapped an oxygen mask over her pale face and lifted her onto a stretcher.
The ambulance sped through the humid streets of Charleston, racing against a ticking clock.
At the local community clinic, the emergency room doctors panicked.
They looked at the massive tumor invading her pericardium and realized they were powerless.
The lead doctor ordered an immediate emergency transport to St Jude Medical Center.
Ethan was just closing his eyes when his hospital pager began to scream on the nightstand.
He grabbed the device, reading the emergency code for an incoming critical cardiac failure.
He threw on his jacket, entirely grateful for the distraction from his broken marriage.
He arrived at the trauma bay just as the ambulance screeched to a halt under the bright lights.
The paramedics rushed the stretcher through the sliding glass doors, shouting medical jargon.
Ethan stepped forward to assess his new patient, his professional mask firmly in place.
He looked down at the unconscious woman and felt all the air leave his lungs.
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The patient dying on the gurney was Claire.
But before he could touch her, a tall man in a dark suit stepped in front of the stretcher and shoved Ethan backward.
