Synopsis

For ten years, Rick and Mary Morrow have lived with the painful knowledge that their son’s only hope for survival depends on another family’s unimaginable loss. When the long-awaited call finally comes, it feels like the miracle they’ve spent a decade hoping for. But the joy of a second chance quickly gives way to uncertainty as troubling questions begin to surface. As hope turns to doubt, the Morrows are drawn into a search for answers that challenges everything they believe about family, trust, and the decisions that determine who receives the gift of life.

Heartless is an intelligent medical thriller that pairs emotional stakes with gripping suspense, asking readers to consider the impossible choices surrounding who lives, who dies, and who gets to decide.

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Excerpt

One

The white lines crawled across the green displays of the monitors, in rhythm with the steady sigh of the ventilator. The name ‘Matthew Richardson’ was written in black Sharpie on a piece of tape running at an odd angle below the squares of glass. The tape had been stuck to the machine in haste six months ago in the frenzy of the emergency room ten floors below. It had been put there during a desperate attempt to save the life of the young boy at the end of the tangle of the wires and tubes hanging between the machines and the bed. No one had seen any point in straightening it ever since.

Matthew’s parents, Tom and Lisa, sat next to his bed. A knot of doctors and nurses hung at the back of the room. No one in the room paid the monitors any attention. The scrolling lines had not changed the hopeless story they had told in the six months since Matthew had been wheeled into the emergency room, a paramedic kneeling on his gurney and pumping air into Matthew’s paralyzed lungs. And those six months had worn away any dreams that the story the lines could ever tell could ever be better one.

The medical team waited patiently for a sign that Tom and Lisa might be ready. Not that any parents could ever be ready for what they were being asked to do.

A scattering of posters and drawings were taped to the wall behind the bed, but Matthew would never see them. Lisa knew this; she had brought them from his room at home anyway, to remind everyone it was her little boy in that bed, not just a stack of fluorescent lines, mindlessly scrolling towards nothing.

Her little boy lay still, as he had since the all-terrain vehicle he’d been riding flipped over. The thousand-pound vehicle had landed on top of him, dragging him down a muddy slope and into a small stream. He’d been unresponsive by the time his father and the other riders had found him, face down in the icy water. A thirty-minute wait for emergency help to arrive had turned into a six-month vigil, and the slow realization that no miraculous rescue was coming.

Lisa’s blonde hair was pulled back in the same tight ponytail she’d been wearing since the day they started the daily treks to the hospital. Strands of identical hair peeked out from under the surgical cap on Matthew’s head. They waved gently, pushed around by the draft of the air conditioning system. Lisa reached out reflexively and smoothed the rebellious tuft. Her hands were thin and bare. Her wedding ring had disappeared from her hand about the same time a four-figure donation had appeared on the website they’d set up to help with the medical bills. Tom had never asked her about it, and she’d never said.

Tom and Lisa didn’t talk about much anymore, other than about the details of Matthew’s care. And the endless stream of bills. And, once in a while, about their younger twins, when the cloud of grief raised enough for them to see beyond the inert boy under the white sheets.

Lisa had never directly blamed Tom, but she didn’t have to. He’d bought the ATV for Matthew despite her objections.

And he’d insisted on bringing Matthew along for his rides through the lake country south of Pontiac, Michigan. He’d said it was a great father-son bonding experience. In the end, it had brought pain, debt, and the slow destruction of the family Tom had tried so clumsily to build. Sitting next to Matthew’s bed, Tom consoled himself with the thought that soon things would be better. Not for Matthew or himself of course. But for Lisa and the girls.

On some unspoken signal, the small crowd in the back of the room shifted their positions. Two of them coughed, almost in unison. Tom knew what they were saying, without them saying a word.

It was time.

About the Author

Brian Fitzgerald writes intelligent thrillers that explore the human consequences of advances in technology, medicine, and the systems we trust most.

Over a career spanning marketing, technology, and national broadcast media, Brian built his reputation as a storyteller and communicator. As head of communications for a billion-dollar information security firm, he found himself at the center of some of the most significant cybersecurity breaches and global privacy events of the modern era, working alongside, and at times at odds with, the media, academia, and America’s intelligence and law enforcement communities.

Those experiences continue to shape his fiction, where scientific innovation, medical breakthroughs, and emerging technologies collide with deeply human questions that have no easy answers.

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