Every Last Beat Read online

  Copyright

  Every Last Beat

  Published by Nicole S. Goodin

  Digital edition: 978-0-9951206-8-6

  ISBN: Copyright 2019 by Nicole S. Goodin

  All rights reserved. ©

  This ebook is for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Published April 2019

  All rights reserved. ©

  Cover design by Nicole Goodin

  Images purchased from Deposit Photos

  Editing by Spell Bound

  Disclaimer

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, places, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  The author acknowledges all song titles, song lyrics, film titles, film characters, trademarked statuses and brands mentioned in this book are the property of, and belong to, their respective owners.

  Nicole S. Goodin is in no way affiliated with any of the brands, songs, musicians or artists mentioned in this book.

  Dedication

  For Kate and Ruby

  “Little by little, day by day.”

  -Author unknown

  Contents

  Copyright

  Disclaimer

  Dedication

  Author’s note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Thank You!

  More Information

  Other Titles

  Acknowledgements

  Playlist

  About the Author

  Upcoming Titles

  Author’s note

  This book is also available as a duet – My Heart Needs and My Heart Wants.

  This book has been written using UK English and may contain euphemisms and slang words that form part of the New Zealand spoken word.

  Please remember that the words are not misspelled. They are slang terms and form part of everyday, New Zealand vernacular.

  I.e: I’m from New Zealand and sometimes we say weird things down here… please try and be cool about it.

  I try not to think too hard about the fact that in order for me to live, someone else had to die.

  Chapter One

  Leanne

  1993 (Day of birth)

  This can’t be right; they can’t be talking about my baby.

  The baby I grew inside my body and gave birth to only a few short hours ago.

  It just can’t be right.

  I can see the bluish-grey tinge to her skin, and I can feel the rapidness of her breathing, but it can’t be because of her heart.

  They’re wrong – they have to be.

  My baby, she’s alive and she’s beautiful…

  The kind of words flying around the room right now, words like ‘life threatening’, ‘surgery’, ‘heart defect’, ‘life or death’… they don’t fit with the precious little girl in my arms.

  I tug on my husband Shaun’s sleeve and he turns to face me, a look of absolute horror on his face.

  “I want to go home now,” I tell him with wide eyes.

  I know I sound like a small child, but I don’t care – I’m scared.

  He doesn’t answer me; to be honest I’m not sure he hears or even sees me in this moment.

  The doctor, the fifth one we’ve seen this morning, approaches me slowly and sits down on the edge of my bed.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Miller, I know this seems like an impossible situation.”

  I want to scream at her. ‘Impossible situation…’

  This is a nightmare.

  I squeeze my eyelids shut tight and try my best to wake up from this terror of a dream, but when I open them up again, she’s still there, staring right at me.

  That’s when it hits me. This isn’t a nightmare. This is my life.

  “Our baby is fine,” I tell her.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Miller, but unfortunately that’s not the case.”

  If she calls me Mrs. Miller one more time I think I might scream. Mrs. Miller was my husband’s mother, and I never was a big fan of that woman.

  “Call me Leanne, or Lee,” I snap at her.

  She smiles at me patiently, in that way people do when they feel sorry for you, and I realise that this smile will become a regular look for me. Whether my baby lives or dies, people are always going to feel sorry for me in one way or another.

  This woman isn’t here to give me sympathy – she’s here to do her job… to help. She’s got kind eyes, and I almost feel bad for taking out my frustration on her.

  “Do you understand what’s happening, Leanne? What will happen to Violet if you take her home with you now?”

  Her voice is firm, but she’s still being awfully nice to me considering how rude I’ve been.

  And I understand what she’s trying to get from this conversation.

  She needs to know that I’ve been listening, that I accept the fact that my daughter will die if we do nothing.

  I’ve heard every word they’ve said, but even still, none of it seems real to me.

  “I need you to tell me what to do,” I plead with her.

  They all know so much more about this than Shaun or I could possibly understand, yet we’re the ones with the power.

  It feels a lot like playing God right now.

  “Unfortunately, I can’t do that. All I can do is give you all the information so the two of you can make an informed decision.”

  I nod my head. I know what she’s saying makes sense, but I’m not sure I can do it.

  “I think I need
to hear it one more time,” Shaun tells her.

  I’ve never loved that man more than I do right now because I need to hear it again too.

  One more time and maybe it might finally sink in… Maybe the answer I’m looking for will become clear.

  I feel the bed dip as he sits down next to me.

  His hand reaches across me and strokes the side of Violet’s face; ever so gently as though she’s made of glass – although the reality is that she’s far more breakable than that.

  When they put me in a wheelchair and brought us up here to the specialist unit, I never expected this to happen – I certainly didn’t consider the possibility of this being something so serious.

  I never thought we’d be feeling pressured like this, or that a decision would need to be made so quickly.

  The doctor starts at the beginning once again, and I’m incredibly grateful that even though she’s delivering blow after blow with every movement of her lips, she at least seems to be on our side.

  The first few doctors we saw were horrible. We were told that intervention wasn’t worthwhile and that we should just go home and enjoy the time we had with our little girl.

  This doctor is more compassionate – more hopeful. If Violet has this operation, this woman will be the one performing it and that provides me with a small slither of comfort.

  If my baby is going to be wheeled off into some cold, sterile operating theatre, then at least she’ll have someone there who’ll fight for her the way I would.

  She introduced herself to us as Dr. Vivian Ellis, and even though I can’t make sense of half the medical terms she’s making reference to, I already respect her immensely.

  She explains that Violet has been born with something called Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome.

  She patiently and professionally explains what that means and what type of surgery will happen if we choose to go ahead with it.

  The left side of Violet’s heart hasn’t developed properly, and her body isn’t able to move blood around her body the way it should.

  I know there’s a lot more to it than that, but my overloaded mind can only handle so much information right now. It might be awfully complicated, but the basics are becoming clear – she’ll require medical intervention if she’s going to have any chance of survival.

  The Norwood procedure is what they call the operation – the first of three surgeries that would ultimately help her heart pump blood to her little body.

  Dr. Ellis pauses a moment before informing us that Violet’s chest will need to be cut open, and her sternum separated while this surgery takes place.

  My arms visibly shake as she goes through the survival statistics of the first surgery alone.

  She explains that the only reason Violet was able to survive in the womb was due to a hormone that my body produced during the pregnancy – it kept a valve into her heart open, but now that she’s been born, that valve has begun to close.

  The amount of information we’ve had dumped onto our shoulders is overwhelming, but there’s one point of clarity in my mind.

  If there’s anything we can do to save our daughter, Auggie’s little sister – then we have to do it.

  The moment I accept the reality of the situation and that it’s happening right now, I know there isn’t any other option for me to consider – I know there’s no way I could take her home and watch her die.

  The thing that scares me most as the team of doctors – along with Dr. Ellis, file out of the room, is that Shaun won’t feel the same way I do.

  He’s been so quiet the entire time.

  “Say something,” I whisper into the silence after a few moments.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  He’s staring at our little girl adoringly as she rests peacefully in my arms.

  She looks so precious as she sleeps.

  I know it’s not a good thing that she’s asleep so much and not waking to feed – it means her heart is shutting her body down, that it’s not pumping enough blood to keep her functioning the way she needs to.

  If we don’t do something soon, she’ll die.

  “Eighty percent, did you hear her say that?” His voice is broken, and I’ve never known him to sound so unsure of himself.

  I heard her.

  I heard them all.

  Every doctor we’ve spoken to has made it abundantly clear that there is an eighty percent chance that Violet won’t survive this surgery.

  My brain had been quick to translate that into the chance of survival.

  Twenty percent.

  It might not be great odds, but it’s something, and it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing.

  “We have to try, right?” My voice cracks, and Shaun looks at me for what seems like the first time since we arrived up here.

  “Of course we’ll try.” His words fly out in a rush and I almost fall back under the weight of them.

  It’s such a relief to hear him say that he wants to fight, that he too wants to give our little baby the best shot we possibly can.

  “There’s no doubt in my mind about that… we will try everything. But I’m worried about you, Lee. I’m worried about me too. There’s an unfairly high chance she won’t make it through this, and I’m so scared of what will happen to us if that’s the case.”

  He’s right. I’m not sure how I’ll cope if we lose her, but I know that we have to try – death is inevitable otherwise.

  I can’t do nothing, and this might be the only thing I’m sure of right now, but at least I have that to hold onto.

  “We’ll try.” I reach for his hand and squeeze it tight. “And we’ll just have to worry about everything else as it comes, okay?”

  If we do nothing, she dies – for certain. Twenty percent of something is better than zero percent of nothing.

  It’s just basic math at this point.

  I focus on that – the one thing I can understand as Shaun pushes the button on the wall that will call the people from our nightmare back in.

  Chapter Two

  Violet

  Present day

  I flick to the next page of the photo album in front of me, like I’ve done at least one thousand times over before this moment.

  The photos of me as a newborn baby in countless hospital beds, wires and I.V lines connected all over my body still make my stomach turn.

  I have no idea how a little baby, that small and fragile, survives that.

  Grown men and woman die from less… but somehow, I made it through.

  When I was born, the doctors gave my parents a choice… they could take me home where I would die in their arms, or they could set up camp with me in the specialised paediatric unit where I would have my chest opened in what would be the first of many surgeries and life altering moments.

  The fact that I’m still here makes it pretty clear which option they went with.

  I slide my finger over the glossy pages and feel the tears well in my eyes.

  It overwhelms me sometimes, just what I’ve been through.

  I hear my mum come into the room behind me, but I don’t look up.

  “Do you ever wish you’d done things differently?” I ask her.

  I feel her sit down next to me. She doesn’t say anything, but takes the album from my hands and flicks through the pages.

  I peek up at her and see her smiling down at the photos.

  I don’t know what she’s so happy about.

  There’s nothing in there that’s worth smiling at.

  Those pictures are like torture.

  Sure, I have the slightly less morbid photo albums – just like August and Charlie, my sister and brother.

  But it’s just not the same.

  We’re not the same.

  Life has pretty much always been sunshine and rainbows for the two of them.

  The worst injury August has ever had is a broken arm from when she fell off the jungle gym at the playground, and my God, you would have thought she was literally
going to die.

  She was eight and I was only six, yet I can still, to this very day, recall the blood-curdling scream she kept up for the entire thirty-minute drive from the park to the hospital.

  Honestly, I’m glad that it’s me and not Auggie that has had to go through this. Having to listen to her being her usual dramatic self about everything would have been far more painful than anything else I’ve endured thus far.

  Charlie has always been in the wars. He’s a typical boy with absolutely no fear. Ever since he could walk he was causing havoc. But surprisingly enough, he’s never even broken a bone; a few cuts and bruises are all he’s had to show for his years of rough and tumble.

  And then there’s me.

  “Why would I regret a single thing?” Mum smiles as she shuts the album and picks up another one.

  These pages are filled with more of the same, only I’m older and I’m past the surgeries, so most of the time my chest and my scars are covered up.

  “Look at those dimples – you were always smiling. There’s no regret here, Violet.”

  Her words are sincere – for the most part, I think she’s happy I’m here. But my life isn’t exactly easy most of the time, and I know she has moments where she wonders if her and Dad made the right choice by keeping me alive.

  Then again, I guess sitting around looking at an album with pictures from the week or two of life I would’ve had otherwise, would have been far more depressing than dealing with my condition.

  At least I’m alive. Most of the time I think they made the right decision, but sometimes I feel like I’m on borrowed time, like I’ve messed with the order of things.

  I wasn’t meant to live through that first surgery, but I did.

  I wasn’t expected to make it to five years old, but again, I did.

  I never thought I’d be here at twenty-one years old… I doubt anybody did.