Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
She's still reading the screen, and then she stops reading it and looks at me over her glasses, and her whole face shifts into the careful look doctors get when they're about to say a true sentence.
"Jassy, I'll be honest with you. This is the best your numbers have looked since your surgery. Ejection fraction, rhythm, all of it. Whatever changed in your life this past couple of months"—she taps the frozen image of my heart, that stubborn little engine—"keep it. A heart this healthy usually belongs to someone who's being looked after. Someone's clearly making sure you rest, and eat, and get worried about."
All I can do is laugh weakly. I know exactly who that 'someone' is, but I can't seem to make myself say anything about him, and I realize it's because I'm scared. Terrified even. It's like a part of me is convinced that if I say just one word about him, he becomes real, and real things can be taken away.
TWO FLOORS UP, BEHIND glass he had no reason to be standing behind, Maximo watched the elevator numbers count down and didn't go anywhere near them.
He had sworn he would never set foot in this building again. His sister had been rushed in through those same doors and never came back out, and for two years the sight of the logo on a passing ambulance had been enough to close his throat.
He had come anyway. He came every year she had an appointment, and every year he stood exactly here, where he could confirm she walked in and confirm she walked out, and never once let her see him do it.
His phone buzzed. A message from the office he paid to make sure her name stayed at the top of the best cardiologist's list, a fact she'd never learn if he had anything to say about it.
Patient discharged. All clear. Excellent results.
Maximo read it twice. Then he let himself do the one thing he permitted himself in this building, which was to lean his forehead against the cold glass and breathe, once, all the way out.
His sister had died here.
Her heart had just filled a screen two floors down, healthy, thriving, loved, and the man responsible for the loving was standing where no one could see him, forbidden from the room, forbidden from the girl, forbidden from every single thing he wanted.
Chapter Ten
MAXIMO CAME TO THE cemetery at the hour when the groundskeepers had gone and the living had better places to be.
He knew the way without counting rows. Down the path, left at the crooked oak, to the stone with his sister's name on it and two dates too close together, and the plot of grass he still couldn't look at without his hands wanting to make fists.
He crouched. He set the flowers down the way she'd have mocked him for, too neat, too careful. You arrange flowers like you're defusing them, Max.
"I found her," he told the stone.
The stone said nothing back. Stones were good at that.
"The girl with your heart. I told myself I'd look once and leave." He almost laughed. "I moved her into your room's hallway instead. She sings in the shower. She's a terrible actress and a worse cook and she calls me Maximo and she has no idea, none, that the reason I can't breathe around her is buried in this ground."
He did not say the rest of it, not even to the stone. That the girl with Mary's heart was forbidden to him twice over, once for the heart and once for the years between them, and that he had been losing the argument about staying away from her since the day he found her.
The wind moved through the oak and didn't answer either.
"I'm not going to tell her." His voice went rough at the edges. "She gets to keep laughing. She gets to keep thinking she stumbled into some rich man's kindness. And I'll keep her safe from everything, including me, including the truth, for as long as she lets me. Even when she hates me for the walls. Even when she leaves." He pressed his palm to the cold granite, once. It was the closest thing to a vow he'd left in him. "I'll keep her alive for you. I promise. It's the only piece of you I've left, and I'll guard it with everything I have."
Then he stood, and squared his shoulders, and walked back up the path toward the gate without looking back.
Which is why he didn't see the girl standing in the shadow of the crooked oak, both hands pressed over her mouth.
I WASN'T GOING TO FOLLOW him.
I really wasn't. I saw his face at breakfast, gray and shut and a hundred miles from me, and I heard him give the driver an address in a voice I'd never heard him use, and I told myself, firmly, that a promise not to pry is a promise not to pry.