Excerpt from Beauty in the Broken Places by Allison Pataki, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

We were both in busy, hard-charging careers, careers that forced us to spend more time apart than we would have liked, and yet we could not help but feel like we were stepping together into an exciting new phase in our lives. After more than a decade of medical training, Dave was on the cusp of becoming a senior resident. After years of being the overworked underling, he was about to start reaping the rewards of his intense labor and sacrifice and sleep-deprivation. At thirty years old, he had spent more than a third of his life working toward this goal, pouring himself into this medical training, and the finish line was finally on the horizon.

I, too, felt like I was riding a wave of momentum in my own career; after two tough but successful book launches in two consecutive years, I was now working on my most ambitious, most exciting book yet. It had been a risk for me to leave my stable day job in news in order to pursue my passion of fiction writing. I had worked hard, and it was an unpredictable but exciting time as I tried to build my career.

And best of all—Dave and I were about to become parents. Earlier in our marriage, we had made the decision to put off starting a family for a few years because of his grueling medical training (plus, it was not exactly possible to conceive when we never saw each other). But here we were. We were finally ready. Parenthood was just around the corner—a little girl, we had found out the week before—and that was going to be the most important adventure of our lives.

"We are on time, can't wait to see you in Seattle!" Dave typed the text message to his eldest brother, Scott, as our plane prepared to take off from Chicago. En route to our "babymoon" in Hawaii, we planned to make a three-day stopover in Seattle to visit two of Dave's older brothers who lived out there. I had never been, and we had even scheduled a quick one-night getaway up the Pacific Coast to Vancouver.

I remember it all with such crystalline clarity: the rush-hour traffic moved, the airport security line was short, and we had a windfall of time to stop at Chili's for a quick dinner. While we waited for our food, I ran across the terminal to grab a couple of books from Hudson Booksellers, feeling giddy at the thought of vacation and so much free time for leisurely beach reading.

It was all so remarkably ordinary, the last ordinary night we would spend as the inhabitants of that life. We spoke about the fact that former Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner had recently reemerged into the public eye as a woman named Caitlyn. We spoke about work and family and the fact that Dave's beloved Chicago Blackhawks would be playing in the Stanley Cup finals while we were in Hawaii. We looked through Dave's phone at his recent pictures of our sweet dog, a little female mutt whom we had left with friends and were already missing.

Aboard the plane, Dave hoisted our two suitcases overhead. We took our seats toward the back of the plane. Five months pregnant, I was always up for a nap, so I promptly fell asleep after takeoff. A sleep-deprived resident, Dave usually did the same, having learned years ago while in medical school to grab sleep wherever and whenever he could. And yet that evening, for some reason, he decided not to sleep. He decided to stay awake to finish up some research work. We could not possibly have known in that moment what was going on inside his body, or the fact that his decision to stay awake just might have made the difference between life and death. I did not know any of that as the plane took off, leaving Chicago behind, and I drifted off into blissful, hormone-induced sleep.

I awoke to Dave nudging my arm. "Yeah?" I turned to him, groggy, unsure of how long I had been asleep. His laptop was open on his tray table. Through the window, the sun was just about to dip below the horizon.

Dave's voice was quiet, but with an uncharacteristic edge to it—a rare, discomfiting urgency as he asked: "Does my right eye look weird?"

Excerpted from Beauty in the Broken Places by Allison Pataki. Copyright © 2018 by Allison Pataki. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.