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The heavy weight of dread doubled when the chopper touched down not at the private airfield, but on the emergency landing pad on the roof of the Pine Ridge hospital building. Jack was close to losing his shite by that point, because no one would tell him a Goddamn thing. All he knew was that Erin was at the Pub with the boys and Kathleen was in the hospital.
“What’s going on, Dad?” Jack asked when Conlan met him at the rooftop entrance. The older man looked as if he’d aged at least ten years since they’d seen him at Christmas less than a month earlier.
“It’s Katie, Jack. The doctors say it’s pneumonia.”
“Pneumonia?” Some of Jack’s worry eased a little. Pneumonia was bad, but nothing compared to the horrors he’d been imagining.
“Aye. Kane found her passed out in the kitchen this morning and called the ambulance.”
Passed out. Which meant that she had picked up the flu, too, and had pushed herself too hard -—again. The woman put everyone else’s needs above her own, too stubborn to ask for help. He and she were going to sit down and have a serious talk as soon as she was feeling better.
Conlan paused outside her room. “Jack, you should know...”
“I should know what?” Jack asked, impatient to see his wife after spending the last four hours imagining the worst.
“It’s ... it’s not good, son.”
Jack heard the words, but they didn’t make sense. He’d had a bout of pneumonia when he was a kid, right after Fitz had dared him to strip down to his skivvies and take a quick dip in the half-frozen pond behind his grandmother’s house. Pneumonia was just like a bad chest cold. Antibiotics, rest, fluid, that’s what she needed. It was 1991, for God’s sake, not the old days when they didn’t have medicine for that kind of thing.
Besides, Kathleen was strong. He’d never met a stronger, more vibrant woman.
Buoyed by those thoughts, he wasn’t prepared for the sight awaiting him. Kathleen was in bed, her skin so white it blended in with the bleached sheets. Her hair and the dark bruises under the eyes were the only splashes of color. The bed was raised slightly beneath her shoulders; silver poles holding transparent bags loomed beside her; a series of tubes snaking into her delicate arms filling her with God knew what.
Jack had to stop and catch his breath. She’d never looked so small or so fragile, not even after the birth of the twins. He reminded himself that she was tough. This was Kathleen. She was going to be just fine.
He moved beside the bed, eyes fixing first on her lips and the bluish tint that stained them. Then on the shallow, rapid rise and falls of her chest. He reached out and took her hand in his, shocked by how cold it was. What the hell was wrong with these people? Didn’t they know she was freezing?
As he looked around for an extra blanket for her, her eyes fluttered open. She stared at him for several long moments before recognition dawned. “Jack. You’re okay.”
The whispered words were muffled beneath the clear plastic mask strapped over her nose and mouth. Her hand lifted as if to remove it, but stopped about half way and dropped over her abdomen as if she didn’t have the strength.
“Of course I’m okay. I promised didn’t I?”
She smiled weakly. “Yes.”
“How about you?” he managed through the pain in his chest.
“So much fuss,” she wheezed. “A couple of days rest and I’ll be fine.”
At two-twenty a.m., Kathleen Siobhan O’Leary Callaghan turned to her husband, and with her last breath, whispered, “I love you, always.”
And in the next moment, Jack Callaghan had lost his heart.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was like a bad dream; the worst of nightmares. Machines screeching and blaring alarms, a rush of doctors and nurses who tried so valiantly to bring her back. Jack watched it all, his heart refusing to believe what his eyes saw. He was tempted to claw them out for their betrayal, for showing him the impossible.
Kathleen couldn’t be gone. She was only forty years old. His wife. The mother of his seven children.
His croie.
The doctors, the nurses, the priest, they all said the same thing. But they were liars, all of them. Evil, lying, rotten bastards. Even Kathleen’s family had turned against him, trying to make him believe that Kathleen could leave him so easily.
Hospital security was no match for a man of Jack Callaghan’s skills. He stood over her, refusing to allow any of them near her. She was his. His to protect. His to care for. They wanted her, wanted to take her away, but they couldn’t have her.
He held her in his arms, willing her heart to borrow strength from his. Kissed her lips, lips that were far too cold, pushing breath into her damaged lungs.