Page 130 of Healed Heart

Jason’s muscles tense.He wants to beat the ever-living shit out of Ralph, but he doesn’t want to put my life at risk.

“Just put the knife down, Ralph,” Jason says evenly.“I’ve already called the cops.They’ll be here any minute.”

“How dumb do you think I am?”Ralph asks.“And I don’t care about the cops.All I care about is denying you the love of your life.I did it once, and I can do it again.”

He presses the knife into my throat, and I wince at the sharp pain.A trickle of blood meanders down my neck.

No.

I don’t want to die.This can’t be the end.I love Jason.I have a life, a future?—

“Ralph, don’t?—”

I gasp at the loud crack of a gunshot.

The knife clatters to the floor.

Ralph crumples under me, two separate pools of blood seeping out of him, one from the gash in his forehead, and one from a bullet wound just under his right eye.

I turn around.

Henry, his face pale, slowly places the still-smoking gun down.

ChapterForty-Eight

Jason

Six months later…

I always wondered if it would be just like riding a bike.If muscle memory would take over, if the rhythm would come back—the steady pulse of focus, the breathless quiet of precision.But this isn’t a bike.This is a liver.A living, breathing second chance cradled beneath my gloved hands.

The moment the scalpel touches skin, it’s as if the lost years collapse in on themselves.I don’t feel hesitation.I don’t feel fear.I feel home.The old steadiness returns—not just in my hand, but in my mind.No tremor, no flicker of doubt.The repair worked.My hand remembers.

My team watches me closely.I feel their caution, their curiosity, their quiet hope that I still have it.But I tune them out, not out of arrogance—out of necessity.There’s only the field, the bleeding edge of anatomy, the soft give of tissue, the hum of the OR lights.

I move through the dissection with careful speed, my sutures landing clean, my clamps snapping into place like second nature.There’s a moment—one that always comes—when the graft is flushed, when the new liver turns pink.

And then—blood flow.Function.

Life.

My chest tightens, not from strain, but from something deeper.I almost lost the part of me that only exists in this room, in these moments.

I don’t smile.I don’t speak.But something shifts inside me, quiet and sharp.Not triumph.Not yet.

But I’m back.

And that changes everything.

“Great work, everyone,” I say.

“Beautiful work,” the surgical resident replies.

“Welcome back, Dr.Lansing.”One of the scrub nurses smiles through her mask.

I nod, leave the OR, peel off the bloody gloves, and wash up.

I have a party to get to.