She could talk with Sebastian, measure her responses, and indulge her curiosity without worrying that he might get the wrong idea.

The following night before leaving the hospital, Sebastian drew to a halt at Isabella Ackerman’s bedside.

He’d told Isabella’s parents that he expected their daughter to make it through surgery, and she had.

Isabella occupied the same room Josiah Douglas had occupied weeks ago. Before and after Josiah, numerous other babies had been treated in this room. As soon as they discharged one, others always arrived.

Josiah had been a full-term newborn. Tiny Isabella weighed less than six pounds. A cap covered her bald head. Long eyelashes rested against the ivory skin of her face.

Outwardly, she looked like a perfectly formed preemie. Her exterior didn’t reveal her life-threatening interior flaw.

Megan, Isabella’s mother, had told him they were trusting God to give their daughter a new heart. But Sebastian knew that one in four babies in need of a transplant would die before a donor organ could be found.

He pushed the thought from his head.

When Megan had asked him if he was a believer, he’d said that he was. Which was true. Yet his history with God was not clear-cut.

He’d had zero familiarity with God during his early years. Then the worst thing that could have happened to him—his only parent’s death—had happened. He’d landed with Christian foster parents who’d taken him to church. There, people had occasionally said things to him like “God’s ways are mysterious.” Or “God is with you in your grief.”

He hadn’t believed in God’s existence, so Christianity had seemed like an idiotic waste of time. But even if he had believed God existed, he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with a supposedly all-powerful God who could have kept his mother alive and hadn’t. Mostly, the idea of God made him angry.

Then he’d been forced to take a scholarship slot on a junior high mission trip to El Salvador, which had only made him angrier. Their group had just finished running a kids’ sports camp for the day when a counselor had asked him and a few others to return equipment to a nearby building. He’d been carrying stacks of orange cones through a basement hallway when the earthquake hit and everything had gone black.

The floor and walls jerked and jerked. Terror subsumed him. Escape. Get out!

A girl was panting and gasping behind him.

Dropping the cones, he stumbled toward the dim light ahead. His shoulder rammed into the wall. Dust rattled over him, clogging his nose and mouth. Why won’t it stop?