A Woman Worth Billions Dated the Wrong Brother novel Chapter 411

Both

Jason POV

The doctor stopped in front of me, and for one terrible second, she said nothing. Alice was still tucked against my side, Grandmother had risen from her chair, Grandfather stood beside her, and Mr. Asher had moved so quickly that he was almost directly behind the doctor. Marcus, Pamela, the president, Mr. Stait and everyone else in the waiting area had gone silent.

I didn’t give the doctor time to speak. “Amber? How is my wife?”

“Amber is stable.”

I closed my eyes for half a second, trying to make that one word enough. Stable didn’t mean awake, and it certainly didn’t mean fine, but it meant alive. Right then, I would take it.

“Is she awake?”

“No. We believe the substances she was exposed to are still affecting her. The sedative concentration in her system was significant, and we’re still looking for the second agent we believe contributed to the fetal distress.”

I looked toward the doors behind her. “Can I see her?”

“Not yet. She’s still in postoperative recovery, and there’s something else you need to know.” The doctor’s expression became more serious. “We had to place Amber on a ventilator. She’s currently unable to breathe adequately on her own.”

For several seconds, I stared at her because the words didn’t make sense. She had just told me Amber was stable, and somehow my brain couldn’t reconcile that with a machine having to breathe for her. My fingers closed around the arms of the wheelchair hard enough that my knuckles hurt.

“No. You just said she’s stable.”

“She is stable.”

“Then why is a machine breathing for her?”

My voice rose enough that Alice flinched against me. That tiny movement cut through my panic immediately, and I looked down at her. “Sorry, princess.”

Grandmother came over and gently took Alice from my lap. She went reluctantly, watching me over Grandmother’s shoulder, and I waited until she was several steps away before turning back to the doctor.

“Tell me exactly what you mean.”

“Amber isn’t maintaining sufficient spontaneous respiration. The ventilator is supporting her breathing and keeping her oxygen levels where they need to be.”

Amber couldn’t breathe.

That was the only part my mind seemed capable of keeping.

My wife couldn’t breathe.

I tried to stand before I even realized what I was doing. One second I was in the wheelchair and the next my hands were pushing against the arms, trying to force my useless legs beneath me.

“Jason.”

1/4

+15 Bonus

Marcus reached me first. My knees folded almost immediately, and he caught me beneath one arm while Grandfather caught the other before I could hit the floor.

“Let me go. I need to see her.”

“Jason, sit down,” Marcus said.

“Move.”

“You can’t stand.”

“I don’t care!” The words tore out of me louder than I intended. “She’s back there hooked to a machine because she can’t breathe, and you’re telling me to sit down? I need to get to her.”

My body betrayed me again. My knees gave completely, and Marcus and Grandfather had no choice but to lower me back into the wheelchair.

I hated the chair in that moment. I hated my legs, the weakness left behind by everything that had happened to me, and the closed doors between Amber and me. For weeks, she had sat beside my hospital bed while I couldn’t stand, couldn’t walk and sometimes couldn’t remember what had happened. She had ordered another bed placed in my room because she refused to recover anywhere else.

Now Amber couldn’t even breathe on her own, and I couldn’t cross a corridor to reach her.

I pressed both hands against my face and tried to get myself under control. Somewhere nearby, Grandmother was crying quietly. Alice was asking Iris something, and people were moving around us, but all I could see was Amber laughing in our hospital room that morning, Amber threatening to divorce me because I’d told her to eat, Amber reaching for her water and then saying my name before collapsing.

Marcus put a hand on my shoulder. This time, I didn’t push him away. 1

“She pressed that button,” I whispered. “She knew something was wrong, and she still found that button.”

The nurse had been coming toward me with the syringe. Amber had barely been able to move, but she’d used whatever strength she had left to call for help.

“She saved me.”

And now she was the one behind those doors.

I looked at the doctor and finally forced myself to ask the question everyone else seemed afraid to say aloud. “Is she dying?”

“No.” The doctor’s answer came immediately.

“Don’t lie to me because my children are standing here.”

“I’m not lying to you. Amber is critically ill, but she is stable with ventilatory support. Those aren’t contradictory statements. The ventilator is doing what we need it to do while her body clears the substances and while we identify the second agent.”

“Can she breathe at all?”

“She’s making some respiratory effort, but not enough to safely sustain her without assistance.”

“Could she stop completely?”

The doctor paused. “That’s why she’s on the ventilator. We’re not going to wait for her oxygen levels to fall before

2/4

+15 Bonus

supporting her.”

Nooked away as my stomach turned. I wanted to break something. I wanted to find the nurse. I wanted Mr. Stait to put every person who had touched that food in front of me and let me ask the questions myself, but none of that would make Amber breathe.

“Do you think she’ll come off it?”

“Yes. Based on what we know right now, we have reason to believe the respiratory suppression is drug-induced and reversible. Her oxygenation is being maintained, her cardiac function is stable, and we’re monitoring her continuously.”

“When?”

“I can’t give you a timeline until we identify everything she was given.”

“So it could be hours. Days.”

“It’s possible.”

I swallowed. “But you expect her to breathe again.”

“That is what we’re working toward.”

I held onto those words. Not hoping for it, not preparing us for the worst. Working toward it.

“When can I see her?”

“As soon as critical care finishes settling her after surgery.”

“I don’t care what she looks like,” I told her. “I don’t care about the tubes or machines. Don’t make me wait because you think seeing her like that will upset me.”

“We won’t.”

“I want to be there.”

“You will be.”

“And when you start taking her off the ventilator, I want to know.”

“We’ll tell you.”

“I want to know everything.”

“You will.”

I finally nodded, but the doctor still hadn’t finished.

“There’s something else you should know about the surgery. Because we didn’t know what drugs Amber had been exposed to, we avoided giving her additional general anesthetic.”

I stared at her. “You operated on her without putting her under?”

“She was already deeply unconscious. Introducing general anesthesia without knowing what it might interact with could have worsened her respiratory suppression, caused cardiovascular instability or created another unpredictable reaction. We determined that adding another powerful drug presented the greater danger.”

My stomach turned again. “Could she feel it?”

3/4

+15 Bonus

“We saw no clinical indication that she regained awareness during the procedure.”