He’d worked incredibly hard to prove everything he’d had to prove. By rights, his accomplishments should have made him feel secure and given him vengeance over his mother’s death and repaid the loss he’d suffered when he was young.

But that’s not how things had gone down. He might look healthy on the outside, just like Isabella Ackerman did. But, like her, he was flawed on the inside.

As flawed as he’d always been.

He smoothed the tubes draping over the side of Isabella’s bed.

The team at the Clinic for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Diseases had helped Isabella as much as she could be helped at this point. Their task now? Keep her alive until she reached the top of the transplant list.

The intensivists and the experienced group of nurses here made it their business to know every detail about every child. The best nurses came to care for each patient and, often even more so, their parents, because the parents were the ones who talked with them, who shared their stories and their fears.

Sebastian couldn’t afford to invest too much of himself in any one patient. Or, after the things that had happened to him, in any one person.

Leah included.

So how come he still couldn’t let her go?

“There’s something special about you, Sebastian. Something appealing.” Her words to him were nothing, really. Yet, he’d replayed them over and over. When stressed. When he couldn’t sleep. When he retreated to his office after receiving bad news on one of his patients.

The memory of her saying that to him loosened the hard knot at the center of his chest.

But as soon as the knot loosened, he’d remember how Ben felt about Leah, and shame would twist his stomach.

He had more than enough to keep him busy here at the hospital. His life should be complete. But it was as if Leah’s reentrance into his world had shined light on the emptiness that had been inside of him for a long time.

He’d been pretending the emptiness didn’t exist and doing a semi-decent job of that.

Until her.

The morning after Leah and Dylan returned to Misty River in late July, Dylan rushed off to see his friends as purposefully as a baby animal seeking its mother.

Once Leah had clothes tumbling around inside the dryer, the fridge stocked, and her suitcase stored in the garage, she turned her attention to her search for her birth parents.

So far, the only thing she’d decided concerning Trina and Jonathan was that she wanted to see them. Live and in person. In order to accomplish that, she needed a current address.