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None of it was working, though.
Gods, why wasn’t it working?
At first, Lila had been confident. Her father had always kept himself fit and trim. He spent time sweating in the gym every day. Despite eating a forbidden sausage here and there, he was healthy. She’d almost been happy when it had happened. She’d renewed her CPR training every six months, and one of the servants had rushed to her side with an AED. If her father was going to have a heart attack, then he couldn’t have picked a better place for it to happen, except perhaps in the clinic itself. A heart attack would wake him up. Booth would bring him back, her father would laugh about his “episode,” and he’d take his condition a damn sight more seriously from now on.
She and her father had a retirement to enjoy.
It wasn’t happening like that, though.
Instead of waking up, he just lay there, his eyes closed, his body shifting and turning blue as the doctors tugged on his exposed chest.
If she’d just turned around sooner and noticed he hadn’t been breathing… If she’d started chest compressions right away…
Oh gods, she hadn’t been paying attention. Her father had been dying—would die—because she’d been too busy watching some stupid children’s movie, one she’d seen a billion times before.
Dr. Booth straightened beside the bed. The cheap paper crinkled as he crossed her father’s arm over his chest. The doctor on the opposite side did the same while the nurses flipped off the beeping machines. The group bent backward to stretch, their burgundy scrubs wrinkled from the hour they’d spent over the prime minister, the fabric clinging to their damp skin.
The doctors caught sight of one another, eyes grim, jaws locked.
Both useless.
Lila shoved the door open and bound into the room. “Why are you stopping?”
The nurses flipped their gazes to Dr. Booth, who cut his chin toward the door. The three men slipped from the room, avoiding Lila as if she were a scratching, hissing cat. The other doctor followed suit.
“Come with me, madam. This isn’t an appropriate place for this conversation.” He slid his eyes toward her father.
“I’m not leaving him.” She stepped beside her father, uncrossed his arms, and began compressions anew, her side aching with the effort.
Dr. Booth watched her work. “Your technique is perfect, madam.”
“Stop standing there and help!”
The doctor swallowed in between her deep breaths, both noises loud in the quiet room.
“Madam, it was a heart attack. I pleaded with him for years to take his health seriously. So did you, but he refused.”
“He’s not dead.”
“He’s been dead for an hour. Even if you managed to get his heart started, there’d be nothing left of the man you knew. At best, he’d do little else but drool. At worst, he’d be a shell. You don’t want that. He wouldn’t want that. He’s gone, madam. He’s already taken his place in the halls.”
Lila stopped her work. The impassive face of the man she’d once called father did not move. He’d smiled his last smile, written his last sentence, spoken his last words. He slept on now, oblivious to the world.
Lips blue.
Skin cold.
She bit her cheeks as Booth recrossed her father’s arms. She tasted copper. “He ate a steak tonight, doctor. A fucking steak!”
Dr. Booth nodded. “You father was fond of many things, madam. Listening was never one of them.” He left the body, took up her hand, and steered her toward the door.
Lila finally let him, leaving her father alone in a brightly lit, quiet room.
That wasn’t him anymore.
It could never be him again.
Her father, the prime minister, Henri Lemaire-Masson, would never wake.
