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everything
    painted in perfectly coordinated, soothing colors, the room made Julian
    feel that St. Mary’s Children’s Hospital in Chicago’s River North area
    tried too hard to keep their patients’ families calm. Their doctors had
    probably delivered some of the worst news imaginable within these walls, and Julian had a feeling from their grim expressions that this meeting
    would be just as devastating.
    “I think this is where Mr. Rogers came to die,” Liam whispered.
    Julian glanced over his shoulder to see Liam standing behind him, a
    horrified look on his young face. He’d brought Clay again. Apparently, he thought Julian needed gay boy love too. Right then, Julian would take all the love he could get. He’d return the love in spades when he wrote the
    next chapter of their lives. They deserved it.
    “Mr. Holmes,” Dr. Martinez started, her short black bob pulled
    behind her ears and her brown eyes grave.
    Julian pulled himself away from Liam’s sympathetic gaze.
    “Call me Julian, please,” Julian requested for possibly the hundredth
    time since arriving at the hospital nearly two hours before. They’d
    introduced him to the entire neonatal team, the cardiac team, and now he was on display for a different team.
    “Julian,” she amended. “These are Doctors Averitt and Dane, and we
    have been working together on your son’s care since he was admitted. The cardiac cath revealed a serious deformity, known as a pulmonary atresia, 26
    JP Barnaby
    in your son’s heart. His right ventricle is underdeveloped, and several of the major arteries are also underdeveloped and misplaced. We would like
    to do an initial surgery to install a BT shunt to bypass the ventricle until we can find a suitable donor. Julian, there is no easy way to say this. The shunt is a short-term solution. The only way to save Robbie’s life is with a cardiac transplant.”
    Julian’s own heart constricted painfully in his chest.
    “I… I’m sorry. Can we back up just a little?” he started, trying to get
    a handle on his emotions. Even though he couldn’t feel it, he saw Liam
    drop a hand on his shoulder. “His heart is deformed?”
    Dr. Averitt nodded and pulled a piece of paper from his briefcase.
    Very serious but disappointingly detached, he pushed his glasses higher on his pale nose and showed Julian a diagram. It appeared photocopied from
    some kind of medical textbook. His graying blond hair fell forward just a little across his forehead as he spoke.
    Julian’s mind refused to focus on just one thing, jumping erratically
    from Dr. Averitt’s hair to Dr. Martinez’s name tag and then back to the
    paper in front of him. He understood, intellectually, that his distraction came from shock and lack of sleep, and he tried harder to concentrate on the diagram of a heart Dr. Averitt held, even as he counted the stripes on his shirt.
    “This drawing is of a normal heart,” he said, taking a black marker
    and drawing a thick line near the bottom right of the heart, sectioning off a part. “In your son’s heart, this chamber, the right ventricle, is too small to be very effective. In order to help the heart pump blood the way it should, we want to put in a shunt here.” He drew a small tube from the chamber
    above into the smaller ventricle. “That will buy him some time until we
    can get him on the transplant list and find a suitable donor.”
    “And a… a transplant will save his life?” Julian asked, balling his
    hands into fists on the tabletop to try to contain the suffocating pain. He’d sat in the Pediatric ICU all afternoon and held Robbie. He refused to
    consider the possibility that his son could die.
    “If you elect not to put him through the trauma of a transplant, he
    may last a year. The stress on his heart will continue to increase as he grows, and at some point, his heart will fail. With a transplant, there is a 60 to 70 percent chance that he will live to see five. With each successive A Heart for