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“What gave you that impression?” he said, suddenly very focused on his ramen.
“I don’t know… maybe the whole buying a random farm in the middle of nowhere without even coming to check it out first?” she said, trying to keep up hercouldn’t care lesstone and kind of failing. “I haven’t met a whole lot of billionaires, but I’d hazard a guess that even for you lot that’s a bit out of the ordinary.”
Brendan’s mouth twitched into a smile as he took another bite, and Nicole suddenly felt a spark of warmth again at having made him smile like that. He didn’t say anything though, just chewed his food while looking into the fireplace.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said, starting to feel embarrassed at herself for her bluntness. “Sorry.”
She’d been treating him like enemy number one all week, and suddenly expected him to have some deep heart-to-heart? She was lucky he was willing to be in the same room with her, let alone keep her on as averywell-paid hired hand. This is what her mom had always meant when she’d said Nicole was too stubborn for her own good.
Brendan sighed and put his ramen down on the coffee table, rubbing his face as if he were tired from more than just a day of hard work. When he started talking, he kept his gaze on the fire.
“I had a heart attack and nearly died.”
Nicole would have choked if she’d still been eating. Instead she just sat in silence, perfectly still, until Brendan finally turned away from the fire and locked his eyes back on hers. She didn’t know what to say. How do you respond to something like that? She wasn’t his number-one fan, sure, and she wasn’t exactly thrilled at having her farm forced from her hands, but… well, she didn’t wishthaton the guy. She wouldn’t wish that on anybody.
As the silence stretched on, the chaos of the storm the only sound around them, Brendan started talking, and Nicole didn’t dare interrupt.
“I’d always taken care of myself, you know,” he said with a shrug and a grimace like he was embarrassed at his past self. “Or I thought I did, anyway. I ran every morning, went to the gym, ate all the right things, never smoked, took protein, took vitamins, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Do all that and you’ll live forever, you’ll be invincible.”
His expression turned dark for a moment, just as a fresh peal of thunder rattled over them, and Nicole shivered.
“I never thought about the stress. Maybe because I wasalwaysstressed. Stressed in school, trying to get good grades, college, every job I’ve ever had, working myself to the bone to be the best, to get further than anyone else, to be more successful… And then I was set to make this deal. My company was going to buy a whole block of Houston, rebuild it from the ground up — and so many people were counting on it going through; I’d made so many promises.”
He paused and licked his lips, shaking his head while deep in thought, and Nicole had the fleeting urge to brush a fingertip over that bottom lip before Brendan kept on talking.
“Then the representative for the seller, right in the last possible moment, said they wanted an extra hundred million and just—” Brendan rubbed his fingers across his eyebrows, as if rubbing away a headache, and laughed, a bitter-sounding thing. “It was just ridiculous. The whole thing, it all came crashing down. And suddenly there was this tightness in my chest. At first it felt like when you’re running and your lungs are working a little harder, your heart’s beating a little faster. But then it got tighter and tighter until I couldn’t breathe at all and suddenly I was in the emergency room, hooked up to a million different monitors with doctors over me talking about getting ready for emergency surgery and…”
He drifted off, shrugging, arms folded in front of his chest like a shield. “All of that time and money and energy spent taking care of myself didn’t matter whenstresswas the thing that caused a blood clot to hurtle through my arteries.”
He shrugged and didn’t say anything else, the storm filling in the silence. Nicole found her own hand rising up to her chest. Her first thought was how scared he must have been. Her dad’s illness hadn’t been easy, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it had been slow and they had known what was around the corner. It was just a coincidence that a stroke had killed him in the end, and considering the circumstances, it was probably one of the better ways he could have gone. But to be healthy one second and nearly dead the next… She shuddered at the thought of it.
“Are you okay now?” she asked. She must have sounded genuine, at least, because when Brendan looked at her, he smiled.
“Yeah, I’m fine. But the doctors were pretty stern about changing my lifestyle.They flat-out said I wouldn’t be that lucky again. So, I guess that’s why I’m here, doing this.”
He whirled a finger at the room around them, mirroring Nicole’s own gesture from before. “The stress, the city — it was all literally killing me. I’d gone into business and into real estate because that was the blueprint for being successful, but I’d always preferred being outside, being active, working with my hands. So, here I am.”
Nicole couldn’t help herself and finally started to fidget, her legs having gone numb from sitting in shocked silence for too long. The tension in the air was almost too much to handle, so she resorted to her usual tactic of joking at inappropriate times.
“You could have just got a vegetable garden or something, you know,” she said, grabbing at her now tepid ramen, desperate for something to do with her hands. “Or a dog, even. There are these things called vacations, too; I don’t know if you’ve heard about them.”
Brendan’s smile widened as some of that darkness disappeared from him, and Nicole relaxed a little.
“Well,” he said, “I’m not exactly the type of person to do things by halves.”
“So, you bought a farm…”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“And now what does it seem like?”
“Still a good idea,” he said, his smile warm in the flickering fire light. “Maybe not what I first pictured, but still good.”
“Yeah, no horses, sorry.”
He laughed, taking the barb with humor, as always. “Well, that’s all right. The cows are friendly enough without worrying about horses. Even if they aren’t the black-and-white sort.”
She sighed, cringing internally. “I literally told you not to have an aneurysm. God… sorry.”
