A sigh of relief made its way around the table.
Dakota put the chair at the far side of the table and sat down across from Neesa. “Our friend had a heart attack going home on the Metro yesterday.”
“What now?” Neesa went blank-faced, her lids blinking in a steady tempo.
“I was on the phone with him when it happened,” Jasper said. “The people around him were rock stars. They saved his life.”
“Goose flesh,” Neesa whispered as she rubbed a hand up and down her arm.
“How’s that?”Veerasked
“Balding head, blue pin-striped shirt, wife named Martha?”
“That’s right,” Jasper said with a scowl.
“That was me. Rylee and I did CPR on a man at the L’Enfant Plaza Station right after leaving work on our way to go meet friends for dinner last night.”
The table stilled until Veer whispered, “Me too. Goose flesh.” She leaned toward Dakota and lifted her brows. “Many people believe there’s no such thing as a coincidence. And if you don’t believe in one set of odd circumstances, certainly you can’t ignore an entire string of coincidences,” she whispered, then raised her voice, “Dakota, go invite Rylee over. We need to thank these wonderful women and toast Benny’s successful surgery.”
Veerwas right about coincidences. It all seemed very neatly woven. Enough so that it was throwing him off.
“How’s Benny doing?” Neesa asked. “He’s out of surgery, but do they have a handle on things?”
“Good,” Jasper said. “Well, not good. He’s had better days. But alive. He’s on the right road to get him to recovery.” He swiveled closer to Neesa. “I’m so glad I found you. Benny wanted to thank someone, but of course, the police don’t give out information.” He nodded toward Dakota. “Dakota was telling Benny he looked bad and to go to the doctor the morning of his heart attack.”
“In my experience,” Veer shot a glare in Kumar’s direction, “men don’t like to know their vulnerabilities, so they rarely go.”
“Well, they’re rewarded when they do show up. Doctors take men seriously, and they diagnose them with great efficiency,” Neesa said. “Their medications are correct and appropriate, and they’re very much cared for.”
Dakota thought there was a bite of bitterness in her tone.
“It’s a little in my face right now, through a colleague,” Neesa said, “that women’s interactions with the medical establishment are vastly different.”
“Really?” Kumar took a moment to shoot a glance back at Veer. Obviously, this was an ongoing point of tension for them. But his expression was neutral when he asked Neesa, “How did you arrive at that conclusion?”
“In every way you can imagine. Mostly, they never really studied the female body until the nineteen nineties. Even things as simple as the BMI. Most people know their BMI, and doctors use it to tell women about their body composition, but it was invented by a Belgian statistician in the eighteen thirties who studied—ready for this? European men. So, white men two centuries ago created the framework for what is a mathematical, not medical metric, that we’re judged by at the doctor’s. There was no diversity in his work. Women just need to conform to the male scale.”
“Huh,” Jasper scowled with a hand to his chest. “So not black men or men of Indian descent,” he raised his chin toward Kumar.
“And certainly not me,” Veer said. “I have two strikes—female and Punjabi, so to hell with the BMI, I’m going to eat what I want.” She turned to Kumar, who smiled at her, then leaned in for a kiss.
“Be right back.” Dakota stood and wended his way toward the front of the bar. From his height, he could see over everyone’s heads. His height was good for that. It was bad when he was trying to blend; his head and shoulders rose above everyone else’s like a whack-a-mole, stuck in the upright position, making it easy to bonk.
As Dakota bladed his body to move sideways through the crowd, he could make out a man talking to Rylee and Rylee sending out visible barbs to ward him off.
The bell on the front door continuously jingled with every newcomer. And with each sound of bells, Rylee was checking the door. Her face brightened with a smile as Erica, her PA, pushed through the door, swinging her head to find her friends.
A group doing a round of hugs and birthday wishes stalled Dakota’s progress.
Rylee took Erica’s hands in hers and was making a kind of barricade with their bodies to wall out that bar leech.
The guy wasn’t letting off.
Yeah, Dakota was aware of the protective growl that rumbled in his chest as he moved more aggressively through the tightly knotted klatches. Dakota got pinned by the corner of the bar, still an arm’s length away from throttling the guy.
Suddenly, there were bobbing heads, a gasp of bystanders, and the crowd spread to make a ring around the man who was face down, his hand bent backward, locked in Rylee’s arm bar, and Erica dropped to kneel on the man’s lower back.
“Security!” A woman called out, holding her phone out, recording the scene.
