Vows Turned to Ashes

This has been the norm for 1,826 days.

In the VIP intensive care unit on the top floor of New York's Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, only the mechanical, rhythmic hiss of the ventilator remained, like a huge yet gentle metal beast breathing in place of my daughter.

I filled a basin with warm water and precisely adjusted the temperature to 37.5 degrees Celsius—the most comfortable temperature for the human body. I wrung out a soft, pure cotton towel and carefully wiped the small body on the hospital bed.

"How about Daddy reads 'The Little Mermaid' to you today? Actually, the Little Mermaid didn't turn into sea foam; she just swam to a very, very deep underwater garden and fell asleep there..."

I deliberately lowered my voice, my tone carrying a cheerful, almost coaxing tone that even I found laughable. Lily lay quietly on the bed. She was ten years old , but due to five years of "deep-sea coma," her body was much thinner than children her age, and her skin had a pale, almost transparent white, as if she hadn't seen sunlight in a long time. A crisscrossing network of tubes extended from her nasal cavity and veins, pinning her like a broken rag doll to this sterile glass box.

Five years. It had been five years since I stepped down from my position as a top asset management partner on Wall Street, relinquishing all my sharpness and ambition, willingly donning this unassuming gray knitwear, and becoming a full-time father.

My wife, Eleanor, was the CEO of a vast conglomerate; for her, time was measured in millions of dollars. Therefore, protecting Lily had become my entire life.

Some outsiders mocked me for being a kept man, and even Eleanor sometimes looked at me with the condescending gaze of a superior towards a parasite. But I didn't care. As long as I could be by Lily's side, listening to the "beep-beep" of the heart monitor, I felt alive.

I gently held Lily's small hand, only a third the size of my palm, my fingertips tracing the bluish needle marks on the back of her hand from long-term IV drips, my eyes stinging.

Just then, I felt it.

It was an extremely faint tremor, almost imperceptible to the naked eye. Lily's index finger twitched gently, yet real, in my palm.

"Lily?" I held my breath, my heart pounding uncontrollably, tears welling up instantly. "You heard it, didn't you? You felt it, didn't you? Daddy's here! Daddy's always been here!"

The attending physician had told me countless times in cold medical jargon that this was just an unconscious nerve reflex, with little hope. But in a father's eyes, this was the prelude to a miracle. This was the miracle that my more than a million prayers had finally earned.

"I'm going to tell the doctor I need to do another EEG, Lily, wait for Daddy..."

My words were abruptly interrupted by a piercing, soul-chilling alarm.

The vital signs monitor by the bed suddenly lit up with a blood-red light, the previously steady wave line began to jump violently, followed by a sharp, long siren.

"What's going on?!" I lunged to the bedside, helplessly watching Lily's chest rise and fall unnaturally.

Within seconds, the ward door was violently pushed open, and the attending physician rushed in with three or four nurses.

"The patient has severe ventricular fibrillation! Her blood pressure is plummeting!" a nurse shouted.

"Prepare for defibrillation! Get the family out!"

"I won't go out! She just moved! She definitely moved!" I screamed like a madman, clinging desperately to the edge of the bed. Several strong male nursing assistants rushed over and dragged me out the door without regard for my safety.

"Sir, please calm down! We're trying to resuscitate her!"

The glass door of the ward slammed shut in front of me, shutting out the chaos inside. I was pressed down onto the cold floor of the corridor, gasping for breath like a fish drained of water, my eyes glued to the gaps in the blinds, watching the doctor repeatedly pound the defibrillator against my daughter's fragile chest.

"God...please...don't take her away..." I knelt on the ground, my forehead slamming heavily against the sterile hospital tiles, leaving a bloody mark. I clasped my hands together, kowtowing in the most humble posture I'd ever taken, to every possible deity in all directions. "Take my life! Please, take my life to bring her back! She's only ten years old ..."

The only sound in the corridor was my heart-wrenching, animalistic wail, like a wild beast losing its cub.

I don't know how much time passed before the emergency room door opened.

The attending physician came out. He removed his mask, avoiding my eyes, his gaze flickering as he looked at the ground: "Mr. Arthur... I'm so sorry."

I felt like I'd been struck by lightning; my ears rang, and all sound vanished.

"The patient suffered a sudden, acute heart failure, leading to irreversible, large-scale brain cortex death. A few minutes ago, we declared Lily completely brain dead, as per protocol." The doctor's words were like cold blades, slicing away at my flesh. "But with the machines maintaining her function, some of her organs are still functioning. Ms. Eleanor's assistant is on her way..."

I didn't hear what he said after that. I slumped against the doorframe, sliding down the door to the floor, crying until my stomach cramped, unable to vomit, leaving only a pool of bitter, acidic liquid. The only meaning of my life, the angel who smiled at me five years ago and called me "Daddy" in a sweet voice, was completely snatched away by death. I became an empty shell without a soul.

Half an hour later, Eleanor's personal assistant, Chloe, walked into the waiting room in high heels, carrying an inappropriate scent of expensive perfume.

She didn't comfort me; she just glanced at me, who lay on the floor like a puddle of mud, and coldly went to the nurses' station to handle the complicated "follow-up paperwork." She casually placed a tablet she carried on her at the other end of the bench and turned to answer an urgent, encrypted call, clearly from Eleanor.

The tablet, having just been used, still had a faint glow on its screen.

Perhaps it was the extreme grief that brought a strange clarity to my senses, or perhaps the evasive look in the attending physician's eyes had planted a thorn in my heart, but I reached out my hand as if possessed.

Five years of being a stay-at-home dad seemed to have made everyone forget that I was once a top liquidation specialist on Wall Street, an expert in algorithms and data vulnerabilities. Faced with Chloe's simple four-digit lock screen password, I almost instinctively entered several commonly used security codes from the Eleanor Foundation.

With a "click," the tablet unlocked.

Without warning, my gaze fell directly on the still-open PDF file in the center.

The title, like a rusty nail, pierced my skull—

"Organ Donation Agreement and Medical Waiver Authorization."

At the end of that long document, I saw my wife Eleanor's flamboyant electronic signature, stamped next to the foundation's legal department seal. The signature date was yesterday.

"Designated Donation Recipient: Julian Hughes. Matching Organ: Heart."

Julian.

That name struck me like a hammer blow. That was Eleanor's first love, the man who, just two weeks ago, had been admitted to the VIP suite on the other side of the top floor of this hospital due to a serious chronic illness. Eleanor had indeed been very busy lately; she said the foundation was facing a crisis. It turned out she was in another ward, with that man.

My hands began to tremble violently. I opened another medication record in the same folder, bearing the hospital's internal encrypted watermark.

It wasn't some "sudden, acute heart failure" at all.

The record clearly stated that just two hours earlier, with Eleanor's highest-level authorization, the doctors had injected Lily, who was in a deep-sea state, with a massive dose of neurotoxin, severing the last remaining weak electrical signals in her brain.

They had artificially and forcibly declared her brain dead.

Why? Because Julian couldn't wait. Because the regular waiting list wouldn't get the top-quality, cleanest heart. Because Lily, kept on life support, possessed a heart perfectly healthy like a ten-year-old's , except for its continued beating! Perhaps not enough for an adult, but the conglomerate's top medical team could easily perform a transplant using bio-bridging technology.

To save that man, my wife used her wealth to pressure this private hospital, forcibly pulling the plug on our daughter's life support.

The attending physician's evasive statement, "Some organs are still functioning," now had the cruelest explanation.

In the notes section of that document, there was a glaringly obvious sentence, Chloe's original words from Eleanor:

"Execute immediately while her heart activity is still at its peak. Don't let Arthur find out; he's prone to emotional outbursts. Compensate him afterward with the trust fund."

"Boom—"

My world completely collapsed before those words.

All those sleepless nights I spent by her bedside, all those tears of ecstatic joy at the slightest twitch of Lily's finger, all my unwavering faith in her waking… in Eleanor's eyes, who controlled the capital, she was nothing more than an "organ-growing plant" to prolong her first love's life, ready to be harvested at any time.

My Lily didn't die from the aftereffects of the car accident; she died from her own mother's selfishness and cruelty. She was a walking blood bag, a sacrifice.