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“She’s fine. For now,” he amended. “That could change as early as tomorrow or as late as next year, or the year after.” His voice echoed with hysteria, and he worked to calm himself down. “She has dilated cardiomyopathy. It’s a heart condition. There are things that can be done in the short term, but she’ll need a new heart to survive it. And maybe not even then.”
“Franky,” I whispered, reaching up to touch his face. Franky laced his hands around my wrists before forcing my hands to my sides. He backed away until he’d reached the fireplace, as if he didn’t trust himself to be near me. I stood there as rain crashed against the wall, heart throbbing.
“Why were you nervous when you came home the other day?”
“The other day?” I asked, confused. There seemed to be multiple things going on here at once, and I was the only one left out of the loop on any of it. I thought over his question, as he didn’t seem to be in the mood to repeat himself or offer any assistance in jogging my memory. I hadn’t left the house in days, not since…Fuck.Not since the day he’d taken a bat to the furniture in one of the garages. Two days after I’d woken up to a text from Selene. My gaze fell away from him.
“Not ready to share yet?” he asked, his anger tugging at its leash. “Fine, I’ll go first.”
I counted each of the three deep breaths he took before he spoke again.
“Selene called her assistant. She wasn’t feeling well and needed her help in getting to the hospital. She didn’t want to risk driving but didn’t think it was serious enough to warrant an ambulance.” The drop in his voice, signaling rage, felt directed at himself. Either he was upset she hadn’t thought she could call him, or he felt guilty that she’d had to face this alone. Probably both.
“She collapsed during their brief conversation. Tricia acted quickly. Calling for help as she sped over to the estate. The paramedics had to administer CPR.” He paused there, shoving his hands in his front pockets to hide the way they trembled. My fingertips scratched against the glass at my back in search of something to hold on to, since it was clear that something wouldn’t be him.
“I spent the next several hours, as she lay in a hospital bed unconscious, searching for answers. Raging at every nurse and doctor who couldn’t give me a straight one, and firing Selene’s assistant for keeping her secrets from me.” His nostrils flared savagely as he fought for control over himself, and I fought to stay on my feet.
“I didn’t know whether or not to call my sons, because I didn’t know what news I’d be delivering to them, and instinctively I knew that had she wanted them to know something was wrong with her, they would have already known. So I waited, and it was the hardest decision I ever had to make. Every hour she remained asleep, and those machines hooked up to her continued to beep, I thought I may lose my mind. Her cardiologist finally showed up, shedding light on the situation.”
I wanted to comfort him, to say fuck it, fuck his anger, fuck what he was leading up to, fuck my fear of the outcome. I wanted to run to him and hold him, and beg him to forgive me. “Franky, please—”
“She eventually opened her eyes, and the first thing she said to me was under no circumstances should I tell the boys about any of this. We went over her diagnosis with her doctors and came up with a treatment plan, but there was a somber note in the room as we all understood what she’d need in the long term. With nothing left to do but sit and worry, Selene decided she’d distract me with frivolous conversation, and the more I encouraged her to rest and not worry about me, the more she worried, and the more she talked.”
I couldn’t stop my tears from brewing as his pain pricked at me from across the room. His beautiful eyes pivoted from hurt, to sorrow, to guilt, to helplessness. But mostly there was anger, and he needed somewhere to put it. He always did. I braced myself for the inevitable impact of it.
“I was going to tell you,” I said in a small voice.
“How convenient,” he sneered, and I closed my eyes, turning my head away from him. “Imagine my surprise when she told me about a young, charismatic artist she met at her last charity event, and how much she’d love to have his work headline her next For the Arts fundraiser.”
I swallowed past my dry throat and took a step toward him.
“No!” he shouted, sending me back into the glass. “Don’t come near me.”
“Let me explain,” I begged.
“I didn’t even have the strength to feign interest in what the hell she was going on about. I was too consumed with the shock of nearly losing her, too consumed with the fear of possibly losing her still. But then she whispered his name.Noon Waters.And that got my attention.”
“Franky—”
“How odd, I thought, that there were two people out there with the same, uncommon name. First and last. So I asked her for a description. She smiled and said jokingly from her hospital bed, ‘Sunshine on legs,’ and I knew she was talking aboutyou.”
Selene may have said it as a joke, as a means to distract him, but Franky said it like it was a weakness he wished he no longer had, and the first fissure cracked down the center of my heart, because he would use this to end us.
“She’s still waiting for you to get back to her,” he gritted out.
I’d never responded to her text, hadn’t given much thought to how my meeting her under false pretenses would come back to bite me until I’d received her message. We’d one day meet. One day, Franky would need to introduce me to her, because she would be a part of his life in some way forever, and she’d know. She’d remember me.
I’d somehow thought he’d already known when I showed up to find him demolishing shit in the garage. But he didn’t know, and we then spent the next several days refamiliarizing ourselves with each other, being obscenely obsessed with one another, and I willfully forgot.
“Don’t use this as an excuse to walk away,” I pleaded, each word a struggle to utter past the lump swelling at the back of my throat.
“Anexcuse?” he asked, appalled. “You lied to me! That was the day…” He stopped to add a few things up in his head. “The charity event happened on the first day of your course. Did you even attend?”
“You’re scared—”
“Answer me!” he roared, face turning red. The patio chair scraped across the floor as the howling wind picked up, the sound only audible because of the sudden break in the continuous cracks of thunder. It was like Franky’s outburst had made even the storm hold its breath.
“No,” I admitted, panic churning in my stomach. “I didn’t plan on approaching her. My feelings for you were changing, and I got curious. I knew I didn’t want our affair to end yet, but I didn’t know we would end up together. I didn’t know that I would ask you to leave her for me. I didn’t think it through, but what I did isn’t some impeachable offense, Franky. It was a mistake. We can get past this,” I said, my legs taking me to him.
