First, there was sensation—the particular coldness of hospital air conditioning, the weight of blankets, the dull ache in my chest where they had opened me up to fix what three weeks of a massive heart attack had broken. Then came sound—the rhythmic beeping of monitors, the soft shuffle of feet across linoleum, the distant sound of a television playing somewhere down the hallway in what I would later learn was the cardiac intensive care unit of New York Presbyterian Hospital.
Finally came awareness. Not the awareness of knowing where I was—that came slowly, assembled from fragments—but the terrible, crystal-clear awareness of what I was hearing my son say.
“They’re going to move her to a facility upstate as soon as Dad dies.”
I should have opened my eyes. I should have reacted. I should have done anything other than what I did, which was to keep my eyelids closed and my breathing shallow, my entire body absolutely still, like a predator learning that the only way to understand danger is to listen without revealing that you’ve already been attacked.
The voice belonged to my son, Mark. He was twenty-eight years old, worked in corporate law, and was the kind of person who had never had to struggle for anything in his entire life because I had spent forty years making sure he didn’t have to. Everything I had built—Sullivan Engineering, the company that had grown from a two-person operation in a garage in New Jersey to a multinational firm with offices in fifteen countries—I had built with the intention that my children would inherit security. Safety. The kind of freedom that comes from not having to worry about survival.
I had not built it with the intention that they would use that security to plot my wife’s abandonment.
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