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“It never occurred to me that it was his heart.”

“Of course not.”

“But it should have,” George insisted. “I shouldn’t have dismissed other possibilities just because one diagnosis seemed so obvious.”

“Look,” David said, “if you think I’m going to let my friend suffer for an honest mistake for the rest of his life, you’ve got another thing coming. Do you trust me?”

Mesmerized by David’s composure, George nodded.

“Did anyone overhear the boy’s mother telling you about his heart defect?”

“I don’t think so. We were alone.”

“Good.”

“But it’ll be in his records. She brought them to the hospital with her.”

“Where are they now?” David asked smoothly.

George produced the incriminating folder and gave it to David. “You never saw it, understand?” David said as he locked the folder in his safe. When he turned back around, he laughed at George’s expression. “Relax. You’re the only one making a federal case out of this. Patients die in the emergency room all the time. I promise you, no one will investigate it too closely.”

“What about his mother?”

“She probably expected him to drop dead suddenly. She’ll figure it had to happen sooner or later, and she’ll trust that you did everything you could to save him.”

George gnawed on his lower lip. “Because he died in the ER of obvious causes, there probably won’t be an autopsy.”

David clapped him on the back. “So stop sweating it.”

As David predicted, no one questioned the cause of death that George signed off on. After the funeral home claimed the boy’s body, the mother was never heard from again.

Their guilty secret strengthened their bond. David introduced George to his congressional colleagues and other influential people. He touted him as the finest medical man in Washington, and since he did it in the same earnest, persuasive manner in which he introduced bills to the House of Representatives, people believed him.

By the time George entered private practice, he was well established with the movers and shakers in Washington. Years later, when he was appointed the official White House physician, he sold his lucrative practice for an incredible sum and bought a house around the corner from the residence of the vice president.

Things couldn’t have been better.

Then he was called to the White House in the middle of the night to pronounce three-month-old Robert Rushton Merritt dead, and Dr. George Allan’s charmed life began its descent.

David had called in the favor granted years earlier. George had never asked, but he’d assumed that David still had the boy’s medical history in his possession. Misdiagnosing the boy’s ailment had been an honest mistake, and a deadly one, but George could have survived it if he’d only owned up to it at the time. It was the cover-up, the lie, that the medical community would be hard-pressed to forgive at this late date. David’s solution, which had seemed George’s salvation, had actually been his undoing.

Because of his present celebrity, an investigation into that long-forgotten episode in the ER would make headlines. It wouldn’t matter how many patients died because of doctors’ mistakes. Everyone’s attention would be focused on that boy, his hapless mother, and the doctor who’d committed the fatal screw-up.

He had to protect his family against a scandal like that. The nest egg from the sale of his practice would support Amanda and the boys for the rest of their lives. She wouldn’t be left with a paltry life insurance policy or an enormous debt to pay.

Left?

It suddenly occurred to George that he was thinking of his life in the past tense. Which was just as well. If he carried out David’s latest edict, he was as good as dead.

Chapter Thirty-One

“You think he’s lying?” Barrie asked, a distinct edge to her voice.

“Dalton Neely is the White House press secretary,” Gray said. “Lying is his stock in trade.”

“This time I don’t think so.”

They were having pie and coffee in the kitchen. It had been almost a week since Neely had announced that once again, the First Lady was withdrawing from public life for an unspecified period of time. The details of her condition were sketchy, and her whereabouts were not disclosed.