“Our. Girls?”
Who said that? Me apparently, the words ground out between clenched teeth.
“Hey, baby.” I knew that warm tone, that smile, because it’d haunted my nightmares for months. Alex sauntered over, reaching for me like he had a right to. My hand was out, enforcing a distance between us without thought. He blinked when my palm slapped down on his chest, stopping him fromgetting any closer. Frowning slightly, he recovered fast. “How was your flight?”
“What the hell is he doing here?” I snapped, unable to keep the question down. Sandra flushed, making clear who the guilty party was.
“Alex…?” Mom croaked and that had me springing into action.
“Outside,” I hissed at him, pitching my voice low. “Now.”
“Man…” Alex shook his head as he looked me up and down, then leant against the corridor wall. “You look amazing, babe. Come?—”
“You don’t get to call me that,” I said, then looked around guiltily. Right when I was supposed to be making sure my mom got the care she needed, I was having to talk to assholes like this? It was peak Alex, I realised. Making every damn thing about him since we were small children and he was doing the same now. “You don’t…”
During therapy, I’d dreamed of this moment. The time when I could finally get some closure. I’d spew out the poison that turned my gut to acid, all over him. But as I drew in a breath to do just that, something stopped me. It wasn’t anger or fear of making a scene.
I just didn’t care.
I took in the well-styled blond hair and the perfectly tailored suit and just saw a guy. A good looking one, and yet nothing about him moved me. That was enough to have me stepping back and away from him.
“I’m not doing this with you.” I loved how calm my voice was. “I’m not doing anything with you going forward. Flying from one end of the world to the other means I don’t have a lot of spoons left, and right now I need to use every bit of energy I have looking after Mom.”
“And money, right?” All of my previous calm evaporated in the face of his cocky smile. “I mean a hospital like this…” He made a show of inspecting the hallway. “It’d have to be expensive. An article I was reading said that even a Tylenol costs hundreds of dollars.”
I couldn’t deal with that right now. Mom, I thought. I needed to make sure my mother was OK.
“Do they have good health insurance Down Under?” There was a sneer at the last two words. “Something that will cover your mother’s care?”
“What the hell do you want?” I asked.
“You.” If this was six months ago, I’d have swooned at that intent gaze, that possessive tone, but that was a whole other Mackenzie. Going to Australia was an attempt to find myself again and what I discovered was I saw through Alex’s shit completely. “I’ve been working hard, making a lot of sales, Mackenzie. For us.”
He edged closer.
“I can cover the bills for you, make sure Kimberley gets the best care. Hell, if there’s a better specialist at another hospital, we can get your mom transferred there. I made a mistake, babe, thought I wasn’t ready to settle down, but I know now you’re the girl for me. If this is what it takes to prove it…”
His eyes widened as I stumbled back. Anything to stop him from touching me. There was a bone-deep revulsion there that came from him being in close proximity and it got worse the nearer he got.
“There is no us.” God, it felt good to say that. “Go home, Alex. Go home or just…” Part of me couldn’t believe this was the man I ate my heart over for all those months. “Go away.”
Turning on my heel and marching back into the room filled me with a sense of rightness, right up until I sank down into the chair beside Mom’s bed.
“Mackenzie, are you—?” she rasped.
“Let’s worry about you,” I said, patting her hand and smiling.
And I got plenty of opportunity to do just that when I met with the doctor.
“The trouble is,” the man in the white coat said, “is we’ve exhausted all the conservative measures to slow down your mother’s heart rate. An erratic rhythm is hard to live with, but plenty of people have it and live perfectly healthy lives.”
Just a tiny second of hope, right before he crushed it.
“But when her heart rate continues to beat too fast, you run the risk of a whole host of health issues. Light headedness and fainting, as happened when your mother was found by her neighbours, but worse than that. When the heart beats too rapidly, it doesn’t pump the blood around the body effectively. That can result in cardiomyopathy or even cardiac arrest.”
“Heart attack…?” I gasped out the word, unable to believe what he was saying. Mom was only in her late fifties and was the strongest woman I knew. The thought… I swallowed hard. “So an ablation is the only way forward?”
“It’s a major operation.” My hands gripped the armrests of my chair as the doctor spoke. “But it’s one with a high success rate. Not without its risk, obviously, but the outcomes of not performing the surgery are likely to be tragic.”
