Page 62 of Where Are You Now
He shook his head, his body trembling just enough to be visible. “I’ve been over it and over it. Like a coach with abotched play, tearing the scenario apart, studying every move, and trying to learn from the situation. After reviewing everything in slow motion, I’ve realized I’d have been able to save him. But in the panic of the moment, the strategy hadn’t occurred to me.”
“We’re all human, Lucas.”
“He died undermywatch, at the work ofmyhands. He chose me. I had to tell his wife.” Tears brimmed in Lucas’s eyes. “I can’t live with myself for that. It ruined my relationships, my confidence to do surgery, my life … I blame that one moment when doubt peeked through and I questioned what I’d chosen to do with my life. Had I subconsciously already decided that being a surgeon wasn’t for me, and maybe my heart wasn’t in it?
“No,” she said gently.
He shook his head.
“I feel entirely responsible because of it. I couldn’t be the fiancé Elise needed. She wanted to go out and have fun, and all I could do was wallow in the heaviness of what I’d done. Even now, whenever you and I have a nice time, afterward, I feel guilty, as if I should be the one in the grave since the outcome was my doing.”
“You can’t think like that.”
“I can’t do surgery anymore. I walked out on my last patient, and the hospital had to scramble to find a doctor to take my place. That’s why I came to Nashville. I took a job where I didn’t have to put myself in that position.”
A tear rolled down his masculine cheek, and he brushed it away with the back of his hand. “I wanted to get out of there, go back to my roots, and find a way of life that would help me cope. I was overwhelmed, and I didn’t know how to relate to Elise anymore. It wasn’t her fault. She’d planned to marry a busy surgeon, and she enjoyed our lifestyle. I no longer wantedthat. I didn’t feel like I was the same person she’d agreed to marry.”
He let go of her hand and ran his fingers through his hair, blinking his glassy eyes.
“Did you talk to anyone?” she asked.
“Of course. Knowing how the brain works, I went to counseling right away, but it didn’t help. I still couldn’t be that guy Elise had agreed to marry. I finally sat her down and told her I couldn’t go through with the wedding. We canceled the invitations, the venue, and we called the wedding party. Elise returned her dress and all but threw her ring at me. She was so angry that I’d ruined her dream. But while that one week would be mortifying for her, she had no idea what that time period was like for me. The broken wedding plans paled in comparison to what I was dealing with. All I could do was ruminate over the fact that the guy on my table was no longer. The smile I’d seen in my office a day prior—just gone.”
The hair on Ava’s arms stood on end as the nothingness of her near-death experience tumbled back into her mind. Had the man on the operating table stepped into the same void? Or had he been able to move straight through to paradise?
“What if I told you that the man didn’t die? He just … moved places?”
“What?” Lucas asked with a skeptical tilt of his head.
“He was no longer there, on your table, because his body wasn’t working. He went somewhere else.”
“There’s no proof of life after death, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
His lack of faith in something more floored her into silence.
He shook his head. “I want to think there’s life after this one, and I try really hard to believe it, but I haven’t been entirely convinced. There’s no evidence in my life that there’s a higher power.”
“Then why go to church?” Ava asked. “You were the first one to say you’d be back. If you don’t believe me, why go?”
“The sermon talked about freedom and love for one another. I think that’s a great message.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “That is a great message. But I can almost guarantee that everyone in that congregation has faith in life after death. That’s what church is all about—a belief in something greater than us.”
The tension in his shoulders eased, and he shook his head. “I used to believe it. Iwantto believe it …”
“You can, but you have to actually let God in.”
Ava said the words before she’d even comprehended them herself. And it hit her: Even without a near-death experience, people who saw miracles in everyday life experienced them because they were open to them. Those who got signs got them because they were looking through the eyes of faith. Had that been why she hadn’t seen her dad? She hadn’t had enough faith?
“I guess with my scientific mind, I need proof,” Lucas said.
She turned back to Lucas. “I’m your proof.”
His brows pulled together. “What?”
Ava told him about how she coded and entered the void and the voice that she could only assume was God. She left out what God had commanded for now, but she told Lucas everything else—how the void was more real than where they were sitting at this moment, how much love she’d felt, and how the experience had changed her.
“It could have been your natural defense mechanism kicking in to protect you from the trauma you were facing,” he said, picking up his wine. “Or it was caused by dysfunction in your temporal lobe, which can produce euphoria or the feeling of an out-of-body experience.”
