Chapter 2 - My Heart Wasn’t the Crime
I woke forty-one hours later in the cardiac ICU at Riverside Methodist Hospital.
My daughter Sophie was asleep in a chair beside the bed.
Her head rested against my sister Rachel’s shoulder.
There was a tube in my throat.
My chest felt as though someone had dropped a truck on it.
The cardiologist explained the medical part first.
I had gone into ventricular fibrillation—an electrical failure in the heart that can become fatal within minutes without CPR and defibrillation.
Further testing suggested I had an underlying rhythm disorder I had never known about.
Stress, exhaustion, and lack of sleep may have helped trigger it.
Martin had not poisoned me.
Nobody had caused the cardiac arrest.
That mattered.
The crime—if investigators ultimately called it one—was what happened afterward.
“The CPR your coworker started probably saved your brain,” Dr. Patel told me. “Earlier defibrillation would have been preferable.”
“How much earlier?”
He hesitated.
“Every minute matters.”
Sophie woke while he was talking.
She stared at me for a second.
Then she started crying.
“Mom.”
I reached for her.
My ribs screamed.
I didn’t care.
She pressed her forehead against my shoulder.
“They said your heart stopped.”
“It did.”
“Can it do that again?”
Children ask questions adults hide behind statistics to avoid.
“The doctors are going to help make it much less likely.”
Eventually I received an implantable defibrillator under the skin near my collarbone.
That little device became part of my future.
Stanton Distribution sent flowers.
The card was signed:
Your Stanton Family.
I asked Rachel to remove them.
Jenna visited instead.
She looked exhausted.
“Martin is on administrative leave.”
“Why?”
“Because eleven people heard him tell us not to call 911.”
I looked at her.
“You all waited.”
Tears filled her eyes.
“Yes.”
Twenty-three seconds before anyone moved toward me.
Almost nine minutes before paramedics restored my heartbeat.
I didn’t blame Jenna for all nine.
But I wasn’t going to make her feel better either.
Then she told me something I didn’t expect.
“Corporate security locked your office yesterday.”
“Why?”
“Martin told IT your inventory files might have caused the incident.”
“My files caused my heart to stop?”
“No.”
Jenna swallowed.
“He said you had become unstable because you were obsessed with discrepancies that didn’t exist.”
May you like
Martin was already building a second explanation.
This time, I was conscious enough to hear about it.
