I put the phone in my purse. Tie my apron. Push back through the kitchen door.
The evening crew is on. New faces at the counter. Tony firing up the grill for dinner. I pick up the coffee pot because someone always needs a refill, and I move through the dining room the way I have always moved through it. Steady hands. Warm voice. The smile I’ve practiced until it looks real from the outside.
The diner hums around me. My diner. My tables. The life that made sense before I knew what it felt like to be seen by someone who noticed everything about me and didn’t try to change me or make me less so he could feel like more. Alec stayed. I was the one who walked away.
I walk up to one of my tables and greet the customers. “How’s everyone doing tonight? Can I tell you about the specials?”
I pour the coffee. I carry the plates. I keep going.
What other choice do I have?
CHAPTER 29
ALEC
The hospital wristband itches.
I lie on the bed in my private room for the second day of my “observational” stay, staring at the ceiling tiles. Fluorescent lights above me, dimmed to their lowest setting. The steady beep of a cardiac monitor I’m still connected to, reassuring me that I am, in fact, alive.
I sit up, if only to prove to myself that I can. The thin cotton hospital gown is open in the back. My jaw is covered in two days of stubble that itches almost as much as the wristband. I must look like a man who has been taken apart and put back together by people who didn’t have all the pieces.
Hell, I feel like it too.
A plastic bag sits on the bedside chair, holding my clothes, my wallet, my keys. The keys I dropped on the floor of my brownstone when my chest seized. Next to the bag, folded on the table beside a cup of water and my phone, is Ella’s scarf. Turquoise silk with its painted sea turtle, impossibly bright against the hospital beige.
The EMTs must have pried it from my hand when they loaded me onto the stretcher, or maybe I was still holding it when I arrived. I don’t remember clearly. What I remember isthe silk between my fingers on the hallway floor, and the sirens, and her face behind my closed eyes.
That was two nights ago. It feels like a year.
A nurse comes in, checks something on her tablet, and tells me Dr. Vaughn will be with me shortly. He comes in a few minutes later.
“Mr. Beckett.” He pulls a chair to the side of the bed and sits. He’s holding a tablet with my charts. “Your test results are back.”
The last time he looked at me like this was in the consultation room at The Retreat, when I was perched on the edge of an examination table pretending I didn’t need to be there. That was three weeks ago. It feels like a different life now.
“And? How bad is it?” I brace myself to hear bad news.
“Your heart is structurally sound. The echocardiogram shows no abnormalities. Bloodwork is within normal ranges. The arrhythmia you experienced has not recurred during monitoring, and the EKG from this morning is clean.” He scrolls through something on the tablet. “The cardiac event you experienced two nights ago was not, in fact, a cardiac event.”
I stare at him. “My chest was being crushed. My heart was skipping beats. I couldn’t breathe.”
He nods once. “All consistent with a severe anxiety episode.” He sets his tablet in his lap and gives me his full attention. “Acute onset, triggered by significant emotional distress. The symptoms can be virtually indistinguishable from a cardiac event, which is why the ER treated it as one. But the testing is conclusive. Your heart is fine, Alec.”
My heart is fine.
I scowl. “I collapsed on my hallway floor, called 911, spent two days in a cardiac unit, and the diagnosis is… a panic attack?”
“Anxiety is nothing to take lightly,” he says. “Have you experienced any stress outside the usual? Any traumatic emotional events that may have triggered this?”
“Yeah,” I mutter. “I can think of one.”
There’s no point in denying it. My body faked a heart attack because I fucked things up with the woman I love.
I don’t have anxiety episodes. I’ve sat in a room with a Fortune 500 board while their entire network was being held for ransom and walked them through the response without raising my voice. I’ve negotiated nine-figure acquisitions on four hours of sleep. I don’t panic.
And yet watching Ella walk away made my entire nervous system stage a mutiny convincing enough to fool an emergency room.
“Your underlying condition still warrants monitoring,” Dr. Vaughn continues. “Your blood pressure remains elevated, and your family history means we can’t be complacent. But what brought you here was not your heart failing. It was your body’s response to acute stress.”
