Everything I’ve been carrying since the door closed converges here. The silence. The emptiness. The words I said that reached her too late. The look in her eyes when she told me that saying I love her only makes it worse. All of it collects on the piece of silk in my hand like weight it was never built to hold.
I grab the keys from the nightstand.
Then I head for the front door.
The pressure in my chest hits only steps from the foyer.
Not the dull ache from the poker night a couple of weeks ago. Not the tightness I’ve been waving off for months, the one I swore to Dr. Vaughn I was monitoring. This is different. A fistinside my ribcage closing with everything it has, and the force of it bends me forward mid-stride.
My hand hits the wall. The keys hit the hardwood. My chest is being crushed from the inside, a pressure so total that my lungs can’t push against it. I try to breathe. Get half a breath. Try again. Less air reaches me now.
My heart is hammering. Not fast. Wrong. Irregular, lurching, skipping beats, firing in a sequence my body doesn’t recognize. I can feel it misfiring and the terror of that sensation strips everything else away. Every thought. Every plan. Every version of the next hour I was building in my head.
My back finds the wall and I slide down. The door I was reaching for is above me now. The brass handle I’ve turned ten thousand times, and I can’t get to it now.
I can’t get to her.
The edges of my vision begin to go bright. I hear Dr. Vaughn’s voice, clinical and direct: The stress you’re subjecting your body to is not sustainable, Mr. Beckett. Hereditary. Your mother’s history. The warnings I filed under “things to think about later” because later is what men like me do with information we don’t want to process.
My later is now. Later is suddenly the floor of my own hallway.
Ella’s scarf is still clutched in my fist. I dropped the keys but my hand closed around the silk when the pain hit and it hasn’t opened.
My phone is in my back pocket. Getting to it takes several tries because my hands are shaking badly enough to make the motion a negotiation. I pull it free. The screen blurs. I blink until the numbers hold still.
If I die on this floor, it’s over. Not the company. Not the deal. Not any of the things that filled my life before Ella walked into it. Those don’t occur to me.
What occurs to me is this: if my heart stops in this hallway, I’ll never stand in front of her again. I’ll never get to say what I should have said on the beach, on the veranda, in the shower, at any of the hundred moments I chose the comfortable lie over the difficult truth. I never hear her laugh in this kitchen or anywhere else ever again.
I tap the numbers I need.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“Chest pain. Severe.” My voice is barely mine. Thin. Compressed. “Irregular heartbeat. I have a diagnosed cardiac condition. I need an ambulance.”
“Sir, can you give me your address?”
I give it. The number. The street. Brooklyn Heights. The words come out the way critical information always comes out of me, clipped and precise, except my hands won’t stop shaking and my chest feels like it’s being squeezed in a vise that only knows how to tighten.
The operator tells me to stay on the line. Stay calm. Help is on the way.
I let the phone rest against my thigh. The screen glows. The call timer counts upward.
The pain doesn’t ease. It shifts, a squeeze that crests and retreats and crests again, and each breath is something I have to fight for. My shirt is damp. The floor is cool against my palm, and I hold on to that because it’s a fact. A solid thing I can register while everything else comes apart.
Ella’s face in the bedroom this afternoon. Her dark hair still damp from the shower. Her blue eyes open. Lips parted in a satisfied smile that I wanted to believe was only for me.
The way she looked at me, as though I was enough. Not the bank account. Not the company. Just me. Alec. The man she believed I was.
I miss the feeling of her hand on my chest in our honeymoon bed in the Coral Crown Suite. Her palm flat, fingers spread, right over my heart. She fell asleep like that. Trusting the thing underneath her hand to keep beating.
I think about what she’ll believe if I die here. She’ll think I let her leave and then went inside and that was it. That I gave up. That the man who said I love you and watched the car drive away simply moved on. She’ll never know I was heading for the door to come after her. She’ll never know the keys and her scarf were in my hand.
She’ll never know I had no intention of losing her forever.
Because that’s not a life I’d want now.
Sirens whine somewhere outside. Distant. A sound that could be blocks away or miles away. I can’t tell. My hearing is doing the same thing as my vision, narrowing and widening with each uneven beat.
