Chapter 7 - The First Cry
William Vance ended the call instantly, stepping into the surgeon's path with a look of desperate, unvarnished vulnerability that very few people on earth had ever witnessed. “Doctor?”
Dr. Aris offered a warm, reassuring smile that drained the tension from the room in an instant. “Congratulations, Mr. Attorney General. You have a granddaughter. She was born at 8:44 p.m., weighing five pounds, two ounces.”
William let out a long, shuddering breath, closing his eyes for a brief second as his right hand dropped to his chest. “And Elena? How is my daughter?”
“Elena is in recovery. She lost a significant amount of blood due to a partial placental abruption caused by the blunt force trauma to her abdomen,” Dr. Aris explained, her clinical tone hardening with professional anger at the nature of the injury. “We had to perform a blood transfusion during the C-section, but we successfully stopped the hemorrhaging. Her uterine wall is intact, and there is no permanent physical damage. She is breathing on her own and will wake up from the anesthesia within the hour.”
“And the baby?” William asked, walking alongside the surgeon as she led him toward the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. “Is she healthy?”
“She’s a fighter, just like her mother,” Dr. Aris said as they pushed through the swinging doors of the NICU. “Because she was born at thirty-four weeks and suffered temporary oxygen deprivation during the abruption, we have her in an incubator on low-flow CPAP to help her lungs expand. But her Apgar scores are climbing steadily. She’s going to make a complete, 100% recovery.”
At the far end of the quiet, dimly lit ward, inside a state-of-the-art transparent Isolette, lay a tiny bundle wrapped in a heated pink blanket. A tiny knitted beanie covered her head, and a pulse oximeter glowed softly around her miniature foot.
William Vance—the man who commanded over one hundred thousand federal employees and law enforcement officers—approached the incubator on tiptoe. He looked down through the clear Plexiglas at the tiny, sleeping face of his granddaughter. She had Elena’s delicate nose and the stubborn, pronounced chin of the Vance family bloodline.
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Slowly, carefully, he reached his large, weathered hand through the access port of the incubator. He held his index finger near her tiny palm. Instantly, the baby’s microscopic fingers unfurled and wrapped tightly around his knuckle with a surprising, fierce strength.
“Hello, little one,” William whispered, a tear escaping his eye and tracing a path down his weathered cheek. “I’m your grandfather. You are safe now. Nobody is ever going to hurt you or your mother again. I give you my word.”
