JENNIFER
“Seth.” I say his name quietly.
He doesn't hear me. He's got his phone on speaker now, pacing and typing simultaneously. “Pull the backup from forty-eight hours ago. Yes, I know that means losing two days of transactions, but it's better than losing everything. How long will the restore take?”
I move closer. “Seth.”
He holds up one finger, telling me to wait.
More people are joining the call. Voices overlapping, all urgent, and all demanding his attention. While he’s on the call, his phone begins to buzz angrily with text and email alerts.
As if I’m an outsider looking in, I see everything happening with a sort of odd detachment. His shoulders drawing up toward his ears, his jaw clenching and unclenching as a vein in his temple pulses angrily as he continues to bark out orders and stress.
“No, that's not acceptable,” he snaps. “I need a timeline. I need to know when this will be fixed so I can call our clients and... what do you mean you don't know? Figure it out! This is your job!”
His voice is rising as his normally pale face turns red, and his breathing is getting faster and faster, sounding like a locomotive straining to crest the hill.
That breaks me out of my almost trance, and I rush over to him, a sense of impending doom making my own heart pound furiously. “Seth, you need to-”
“Not now, Jennifer!” he snaps not even looking at me. “Allen, conference in the legal team. We need to assess liability. If this was a hack, we need to know immediately. If it was hardware failure, I want to know why our redundancies didn't kick in. Someone screwed up, and I want to know who.”
He's fully into it now. The panic, the need to control, the drive to fix it himself. I can practically see his blood pressure rising with every word.
“Seth, please,” I beg, touching his arm, trying to ground him and pull him back to me before it’s too late. “You need to step back. Let them handle-”
He shakes me off. “I said not now! This is a crisis. I need to... we need to...” He's typing and talking and pacing all at once. “Get me the system logs. All of them. I want to see exactly when this started and-”
He stops mid-sentence. His hand going to his chest.
“Seth?”
All the color drains out of his face, leaving it a sickly gray as fat beads of sweat break out across his forehead. The phone slips from his limp fingers to clatter on the shiny wood floor.
“Seth!” I'm at his side instantly.
“Can't...” His breath comes in short, shallow gasps. “Can't breathe. Chest... Jennifer...”
No. No! This is it. This is what I was afraid of.
“Sit down.” I guide him to the couch, my heart hammering as I try my best to remain calm. His skin is clammy under my hands. “Sit down right now. Where's your nitroglycerin?” I ask needlessly, even as I’m running toward the bedroom for it.
In the bedroom, I grab the small bottle off his nightstand and race back to find him slumped on the couch, his face still thathorrible gray color as his fingers dig into his chest as if he could massage the pain away.
“Under your tongue.” I shake one out and cup his jaw as he slowly opens his mouth as his blue eyes roll to lock with mine. I push the pill under his tongue and grab my phone from my back pocket.
“9-1-1, what's your emergency?”
“My... my boyfriend. He's having chest pain. He has a heart condition. He can't breathe properly.”
The dispatcher's voice is calm, professional. “How old is he?”
“Thirty-six. He collapsed three months ago. He's on blood pressure medication, blood thinners...”
I answer her questions while watching Seth. His eyes are closed now, and his breathing is still labored. On the floor, his phone is still connected to the conference call. I can hear reedy voices asking where Seth went and what happened.
The urge to stomp on it nearly overtakes me. Instead, I pick it up, end the call without a word, and then toss his phone onto the other end of the couch.
“The ambulance is five minutes out,” I tell him, kneeling in front of him and rubbing his legs and arms. “Stay with me. Just breathe. In for four, hold for four, out for six. Remember? Like you learned.”
