“I’ll never understand it,” he says, dropping his head.
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
“I’ll never understand how you could make that choice,” he says, his head coming up, his gaze sharp and unforgiving. “You of all people. You lost your brother to this illness, and you decided to play fucking Russian roulette?”
“It wasn’t like—”
“I’m not finished!” he bellows. My gaze slides to the door, expecting a nurse to come running. Maybe he already warned them. “All that bullshit about going back to Florida. Were you really going to go back to live? Or were you set to die? To rob those who love you of your life.”
“I’ve been living my life for other people since Connor died,” I retort, my tone low and obstinate. “And you want the truth? I wasn’t sure when I left home.” God forgive me for my lie. The worst I’m guilty of is recklessness. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I was just frightened for the longest time. We’re all dying, Whit, from the moment we take our first breath.”
“A nihilist to boot,” he says with an unhappy laugh.
“I could’ve died without ever knowing I had Brugada, just like Connor. A death not chosen. The result out of my hands.”
“Here one minute and gone the next?” he demands with a snap of his fingers. “Well, that nearly fucking happened.” I hate that his hands are shaking. I hate that I’ve put him in this position and made him this angry. But I don’t hate that he was there to save me. To give me another chance. Just because I can’t have him doesn’t mean I don’t want to live.
“I know it might seem strange to you—”
“Doesn’t seem strange at all,” he retorts. “You weren’t thinking of anyone but yourself.”
His words land like a knife to the stomach. They are no more than I deserve.
“So what if I was?” My fear turns physical, a cold lump now in my stomach, my tears running freely now. “Dying or living with the threat of death? Living with the danger of eight hundred indiscriminate volts through my chest? Do you know how anxious I’ve been? No, you wouldn’t know. How could you?”
“Exactly my point. I couldn’t know because you never told me.”
“I just wanted to be an ordinary person,” I almost whisper.
“I won’t pretend I can even imagine I have one iota of that understanding,” he says, his voice softer. Even if he can barely stand to look at me.
“ICDs fail. They save lives, yeah. But they’re not without their own problems.” Not that I’ll go into it with him. They can shock you into a cardiac arrest for no reason. Parts of the device can be recalled; other parts just outright fail. Batteries need replacing and don’t let your iPhone get anywhere near it! I shake my head. Like my phone was even a consideration given the severity of the circumstances. Getting an ICD is signing up to a lifetime of operations—heart surgeries, possible infections. Those kill, too.
“It sounds like you were already weighing up your options for the best way to die when you arrived.”
And now I lie.
“Maybe I was. Maybe you’re right about playing Russian roulette. I considered that I might live a normal life without an ICD, bow out when it’s time.”
“You mean like last week,” he asks, “at the age of twenty-four? Did that time seem right to you?” Anger chases through his second question.
“I thought, hoped when I’d considered that an option, that I would be older. Or else I thought I might have the device fitted and have it kill me early anyway. I don’t know how to explain it.”
I won’t say I never thought these things, but the thoughts were only fleeting and now seem like distant memories, no longer relevant in the current scheme of things. I was working from a place of extreme fear. My fear, my parents fear. Fear of what happened to Connor.
“And you thought running away might help?”
I shake my head. “It felt like buying time. One last hurrah before I gave in.” I wasn’t giving in to death. I was giving in to fear of what life with an ICD would mean.
“Gave in to what?” he asks angrily. “A life where you wouldn’t drop dead without a second’s notice?”
“To terror!” Weakness trembles through my body, but anger chases it much more forcefully. “I bore the burden of my family’s fear for years, can’t you see that? That’s why I lived at home. Why I didn’t visit the gym, drink, or party with my friends. As long as I wasn’t suffering symptoms, I was okay. I wasn’t frightened. Everything was okay. But then at my last cardiology appointment, they repeated the stress test, then laid out the news. I was at risk now. It was real—it was happening.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you’d put your family through the worry of a six-month wait.”
“I wasn’t sure I wanted the ICD.” This is so true, butwantdidn’t come into it. “Aren’t you listening? It was like being placed between the devil and the deep blue sea. I couldn’t think of their fears anymore because I had too many of my own. That’s why I left. I wanted time to myself. Time to live, to experience life like other girls do. But then there was you.”
“Me,” he repeats gravely. “Another person you couldn’t tell.”
