Chapter 2 - The Awakening at Mount SinaiI woke at Mount Sinai Hospital with an IV line taped to the back of my hand and an irritated cardiologist standing at the foot of my bed.
The room smelled of antiseptic, artificial lemon, and the faint metallic tang of recycled air. Outside the window, the Manhattan skyline shimmered through a veil of summer smog.
The cardiologist’s name was Dr. Paul Kaplan.
He was fifty-something, wore rimless glasses that slipped slightly down his nose, and had apparently reached that comfortable stage in his career where fear of wealthy, powerful patients had been entirely replaced by a profound, exhausted disappointment in them.
“You’re lucky, Mr. Moretti,” he said, tapping a metal clipboard against his thigh.
I turned my head slowly. My neck felt stiff, as though someone had beaten it with a rubber mallet. I looked past him toward the heart monitor by the door. The green line traced a steady, rhythmic beep that sounded entirely too loud in the quiet room.
“I’ve been told,” I rasped. My voice sounded like gravel grinding in a cement mixer.
“No, Mr. Moretti,” Kaplan corrected, his tone flat. “You’re not just lucky. You’re alive because someone called 911 within forty seconds of your collapse and stayed on the line to describe your pulse rhythm.”
My mouth tasted metallic, coated in the chalky residue of whatever drugs they had pumped into my veins.
“What happened?”
“Ventricular fibrillation triggered by severe dehydration, acute exhaustion, and an underlying electrical conduction abnormality in your right bundle branch that you appear to have spent the last ten years aggressively ignoring.”
I stared at the ceiling. “I didn’t know I had it.”
“You knew you had episodes,” Kaplan said, not unkindly, but firmly. “You’ve had chest tightness during board meetings, haven't you? Dizziness when you stood up too fast? Men of your type think your bodies are corporate assets with infinite warranties. They aren't.”
I didn't answer him. There was nothing to say. He was right, and I hated him for it.
Two men from my security team—former federal marshals who now spent their days guarding my apartment and vetting my visitors—stood outside the glass door of the private room. They were trying very hard not to look inside, their arms crossed over their dark suits, their posture rigid.
I hated hospitals.
It wasn't the blood, or the needles, or the sterile white walls.
It was the dependence. For forty-two years, Dominic Moretti had never depended on anyone for anything. I built my private equity firm from a rented desk in Brooklyn into a multi-billion-dollar empire by never showing weakness, never asking for help, and never leaving my fate in the hands of strangers.
Now I was lying flat on my back, wired to a wall like a broken appliance.
“Who called?” I asked, my eyes snapping back to the cardiologist.
The nurse standing beside Kaplan—a tired-looking woman with kind, crinkling eyes—smiled softly.
“A little girl.”
I looked at her. For a second, I thought it was a metaphor, some philosophical nonsense doctors tell patients to make them appreciate life.
“What?”
“A little girl,” the nurse repeated. “Maybe six years old. Blonde curls, faded yellow dress. She stayed kneeling beside you on the asphalt until EMS arrived. The lead paramedic wrote it in his incident notes because he’d never seen a kid keep her head like that in a midtown mob.”
A cold prickle ran down my spine, entirely unrelated to my heart condition.
“Where is she?”
“Gone, Mr. Moretti.”
“Her name?”
“No one got it. The ambulance crew was focused on your airway and your heart rhythm. By the time they looked up to thank her, she had walked away down Fifty-Third Street.”
I stared at the nurse, then at the doctor.
A six-year-old child in a yellow dress had pulled me out of the grave, and she had vanished into the concrete jungle without leaving a trace, carrying a pharmacy bag.
“Find her,” I said.
May you like
Dr. Kaplan sighed, shaking his head. “Mr. Moretti, you just suffered a major cardiac event. Your priority right now is resting your myocardium, not playing detective.”
“Find her,” I repeated, my voice dropping into that low, flat register that usually made grown executives in my office turn pale. “I want every traffic camera, street-corner lens, and dashcam between Lexington and Park Avenue reviewed from two o’clock to three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon. I want to know who that child is before the sun sets tonight.”
