Heart Conditions (The Breakup Doctor Series Book 3) (7 page)

I stared for a moment, trying to make sense of his question. “You mean the pedestrian park in New York that used to be an elevated train track?”

He nodded. “That thing’s amazing. I walked it from one end to the other while I had time on my hands. It’s transformed that area by the Hudson docks—it’s all planted up and beautiful—and it’s added really needed public space to that area. Plus they’re reusing what were idle resources, and avoiding the waste of having to demolish the old track infrastructure.”

I loved listening to Ben talk about architecture and green building. His passion for what he did was part of what had initially attracted me to him, and his enthusiasm was contagious. While we were dating I’d started to see my surroundings through his eyes—the beauty and potential in places people had forgotten about: abandoned homes, old warehouses, stretches of land or beachfront where hurricane-damaged buildings still littered the landscape. He always saw the hidden value in things other people had written off.

“You think there’s a way to do something like that here?” I guessed, knowing the way his mind worked.

He nodded. “Those old defunct Seaboard Railway tracks? They’d make a fantastic hiking and biking trail, and the parts that run through town could be turned into a similar kind of park. They did something like that in Tampa, and—”

Jake’s bark cut him off. The dog had finished his dinner and brushed past me on the way to the back door—he always had to poop immediately after eating—and I automatically reached to unlock it and let him out into the yard.

“Thanks,” Ben said, but the easy rhythm of our conversation had been broken. We stood there in silence for a few moments, until it grew awkward. There was no reason for me to stay longer—I knew that—but standing here in Ben’s home, alone with him, I was reluctant to go.

I couldn’t put off the inevitable. I pushed myself away from the counter.

“Hey, did…Does everything seem okay to you?” Ben asked, peering at me.

I stopped. “What…How do you mean?” I asked cautiously, my heartbeat seeming to pick up force and hammer at my ribs.

“With Jake. Did you happen to notice if he’s acting weird?”

I blew out the breath I’d been holding. “Weirder than normal, you mean?”

Ben gave a half smile. “Yeah. Does he seem lethargic to you, or…well, depressed?”

I leaned back again, grateful for the momentary reprieve. “Jake?” Looking out the kitchen window to the backyard, I could clearly see the dog running in frenzied circles around the majestic live oak in Ben’s backyard, his gaze fixed upward, barking excitedly at something in the uppermost branches, or God. “I wouldn’t say depressed, no,” I said wryly. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I sort of thought he was acting strange the week before I left. He’d just lie around, and he looked…this sounds dumb, I know…but he looked sad.” Ben looked a bit sheepish himself at the words, but my heart swelled at the tenderness he showed the dog.

“I wasn’t watching for anything like that, but he was with me pretty much nonstop,” I said. “I probably would have noticed if he was acting so different from his usual manic-manic disorder.”

Ben gave an embarrassed laugh. “Right. Helicopter parent—sorry.”

Don’t apologize. It’s adorable.
But I didn’t say it out loud. “If you’re worried about him, I could take him to the vet for you,” I blurted. “I mean…if you’re too busy with work.”

“Really? I hate to ask, but if you have time…”

“Of course I will.”

When he moved close beside me to share Jake’s vet info on his phone, I breathed in his scent—cedar and citrus. We transferred the contact info to my phone, and Ben said he’d call the front desk tomorrow to let them know I was authorized to get treatment for the dog. Too soon he stepped away, and again I pushed myself away from the counter.

“I’ll leave a key hidden outside for you, so you can pick Jake up and drop him off at your convenience,” Ben said.

“Sure,” I said nonchalantly, but I was fighting the urge to smile. It wasn’t quite giving me a key to his house, but it still felt…I didn’t know. Like
something
.

He opened the back door to let Jake back inside, and I bent to ruffle the dog’s fur and kiss him goodbye on top of his nose. I managed to control my giddy impulse to do the same for Ben, but after we said goodbye I waltzed out to my car with an undeniable bounce.

Ben had asked me to watch his dog while he was out of town. He’d welcomed me inside tonight, purposefully made conversation, seemed reluctant to let me go, and now he was asking me to take more responsibility for Jake. Well, agreeing, anyway. Granted, his mom was out of town and Perfect Pamela was probably too busy doing brain surgery on sick kids to worry about taking care of his dog for him, but still…

This was what we in the mental health field called
inroads
. For the first time since our breakup, I thought there might actually be a crack in the door I thought had closed for good.

Perfect Pamela aside.

(Details, details…)

nine

“I loved your article.”

I could tell as soon as I answered his call that Michael knew my column that had run in this morning’s paper was about him. About us. No surprise—once upon a time I thought he’d known me better than anyone.

Lisa had ended up running it verbatim—a startling testament to the new Lisa, I thought; the one who heard other people’s points of view and actually considered them instead of bulling through with an autocratic dictate. I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually
like
Lisa, but I was coming to respect her.

“Thanks,” I said, balancing the phone in the crook of my neck as I swiped on mascara. “And also…thanks. I’m glad you came back and we finally talked.”

“Me too. I didn’t actually think you’d let me within throwing distance.” I knew him well enough to hear the smile in his voice, and an answering smile stretched my face.

“Neither did I.”

There was a moment’s silence, not uncomfortable, and then: “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Michael said, serious now.

I froze. “Yeah?” I said lightly. “I’m surprised there’s anything we missed in our marathon conversation.” My heart had sped up and I put a hand on it, not liking my reaction. I didn’t want Michael to want anything from me. Did I? I finally had peace from everything that had happened, and I’d moved forward. If Michael was hoping to renew something between us…wasn’t that moving backward?

Maybe it’s just going home
, an unwelcome voice whispered in my head.

“Are you free later today? Tonight?”

“I’m working all day,” I hedged. “And I have my radio show later.” I’d deliberately arranged my twice-weekly radio schedule for Monday mornings and Friday afternoons, because callers tended to need to talk to someone about their breakups most either right before a lonely weekend, or right after one.

“Okay. Tonight, then. Oh…Unless you have plans…” He deliberately left that hanging. Friday night—of course a single woman had plans.

Except that I didn’t. And Dating 101 said that you never, ever accepted a last-minute date—especially on a weekend.

But this was not a date.

“Brook?”

I realized I’d let a lengthy silence fall. “I can’t do tonight, actually.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “Right.”

“But I can meet for a drink or coffee right after my radio show,” I found myself saying. “Just for an hour.”

As Michael’s tone brightened and we planned where and when to meet, I hoped my change of heart was motivated only by curiosity.

My last caller on the Kelly Garrett show took up more time than the perky, pretty deejay and I usually allotted, but the woman’s situation was complicated—and one I thought a lot of listeners might relate to. Nina had been with her boyfriend, Greg, for more than five years when she finally laid down the line: He came up with a ring or she was gone.

No ring was forthcoming, and Nina literally walked her talk and left him, moving out of their St. Pete apartment and relocating to Fort Myers to start over. But she was still deeply grieving the loss of her lover, best friend, and partner, and worried that she’d taken a perfectly healthy, happy relationship and thrown it away. She was working a mindless new job in retail that she hated, had made no friends here, and was still living in the barren furnished apartment she’d rented, surrounded by unpacked boxes.

This was a lot more than we could tackle in a three- to five-minute phone call—the radio call-in sweet spot, I’d learned in the last year on air.

“That’s a hard situation, Nina,” I said into the mike. “How long since things ended and you moved here?”

“Four months.”

“That’s a long time.”

“A
long
time,” she said, and her voice started to wobble.

“Without knowing more, it’s hard to get to the bottom of what happened, how you might address things as far as you and Greg and your relationship. It sounds like it might help you to talk to someone to work through that. But meanwhile it’s important that you not live in limbo because your relationship ended.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were a ‘we’ for a long time, and you created a life as a couple, it sounds like. But since then it seems you’ve been living in a vacuum—not seeking out meaningful work or friends or even making a home for yourself. Regardless of what may happen between the two of you—or not—you still
exist
, and you have to treat yourself with the importance you gave to the two of you as a couple. It sounds like although you backed up your ultimatum to Greg and moved away, you’re still waiting for him to recant—not creating anything you wouldn’t want to walk away from here because you’re still hoping he’ll change his mind and call.”

“Well, of
course
that’s what I’m hoping for!” Nina exploded. “We’ve been together so long, and we shared everything—even bank accounts. For all intents and purposes it was a marriage, so how does a piece of paper change anything? If I stay gone long enough, he’s going to see that.”

Kelly looked up from the mixing board and caught my gaze, and her usually smiling brown eyes were drawn down in a mix of sympathy and disapproval.

Nina hadn’t truly backed up her bluff—she was just playing the long game. There was clearly a lot of backstory here that couldn’t be neatly tied up in our quick and very public phone call, but I wanted to leave her with at least something to work on in the short term.

“Maybe so, Nina. But maybe not. I don’t want to counsel you on what to do about Greg without knowing more, but I can tell you this: If you don’t figure out who you are on your own, then you’re going to live the rest of your life as a satellite, orbiting around Greg or someone else and your couplehood with them, and you’re never going to truly feel at home in your own skin.”

There was a beat of silence and then: “I don’t…I don’t know what you mean.”

“You gave Greg an ultimatum—”

“I
hate
that word. What a stupid cliché.”

“Call it what you want—you drew your line in the sand, and Greg didn’t step over it. Okay, there are a lot of ways to address that—but meanwhile you’re still living Greg’s life, not your own. You’re on hold while you try to force his hand into doing what you want. Four months have gone by, and you say you’re trying to move on, but are you? You’re working a job that requires nothing of you, you’ve created no attachments of your own, and you haven’t even unpacked your own things into the place you’re living. You’re not living
your
life—you’re still trying to make Greg live the life you think you want. You want to work things out with him, and maybe you can, but right now what is it you think he’ll be drawn back to?”

“What do you…I mean,
us
. What we had,” she said heatedly.

“That’s gone. Live in the present.”

In the pause that followed I heard a shaky breath and a sniffle. “I don’t…I don’t know how to do that.”

For the first time she sounded vulnerable instead of defensive, and now we could do some productive work. “Start small. Unpack a box. Then another one. This is your home—at least for now. Live in it. Find a job that fits your experience, that fulfills you on some level if this one doesn’t.
Talk
to people. Make a friend. Treat yourself as though
you
matter—until you do, neither Greg nor anyone else is going to think so.”

“That sounds so…permanent. I don’t know if I want to settle in here. St. Pete is home—I
had
all that there.”

“Then stop playing games and go back—and do all those things on your own in St. Pete. You’re more than Greg’s girlfriend, Nina—but that doesn’t necessarily mean becoming Greg’s
wife
. Be Nina first. You won’t know what you really want until you do.”

Michael was waiting in a corner booth at the Hot Pot when I got there after the show. He was leaning against the wall, one leg bent up onto the banquette, reading a newspaper, and for one second time moved backward. I’d seen him exactly like this dozens of times on lazy Sunday afternoons when we rolled out of bed late because of his Saturday-night gigs and took our rumpled, unshowered selves to brunch at some nearby restaurant.

He looked up and time caught up with itself. A pressed button-down replaced his usual wrinkled concert t-shirt, and his hair was combed and neat, threads of gray reminding me that he wasn’t the same Michael from my memories.

But I couldn’t help a smile. It was still good to see him without having to hate him. I slid into the booth.

“Am I late?” I asked.

He sat up, lowering his leg back under the table so quickly it slammed into the edge, and he winced before loosing his familiar crooked smile on me. “I’m early. How about
that
?”

One of our ongoing spats while we’d been together was Michael’s chronic inability to arrive anywhere at an appointed time, as if structure were for other people, but didn’t apply to him. It was what precipitated our final argument, in fact.

“That
is
unexpected,” I said. “I debated telling you we were meeting at six, just to get you here on time.”

“I didn’t want to keep you waiting.” He tapped his fingers in an erratic drumbeat on the menu on the table. “I was going to order you a dirty martini, but I didn’t know if that was still your drink.”

“I’ll just have a beer, actually.” Partly I wanted to make sure I kept my wits about me, and dirty martinis went down far too easily. But some perverse part of me ordered something different because I didn’t want Michael to still think he knew me so well. Or that I hadn’t changed.

He raised his eyebrows and smirked, and I knew he’d understood my motivation as clearly as if I’d said it aloud. “Let’s get the lady a beer, then. PBR?”

“God, no. Busch, please.”

He laughed and caught our server’s eye, motioning her over. The girl, leaning against a counter, arms crossed, stared uninterestedly at us for a moment before pushing herself upright with visible effort and trudging over. “You need something?”

Michael eyed our empty table, then me, and I could read his expression like a headline:
You think?
I smothered a chuckle.

“We’ll have two Anchor Steams, please. No mugs.”

“Yeah.” She ambled off.

Michael was a beer snob, and had turned me into one while we’d been together. He knew there was no question that any brew found at a NASCAR race would cross my lips.

It was so easy to fall back into our usual banter. Too easy. I schooled the smile off my face. “So…you had something you wanted to talk about?”

He straightened. “Oh. Yeah, I do. It’s about your work. The Breakup Doctor.”

“My…work?” Of all the scenarios I’d pictured for Michael’s return, having him retain my services wasn’t even on the map. Did he want to hire me to get him past a breakup?

Oh, good lord. Did he want to hire me to get him past
our
breakup? He’d told me at length what bad shape he’d been in after he jilted me. Was Michael still not over it?

Or was this just a way to try to get me back?

Not that long ago I’d sat here with another man—Chip Santana, a former client I’d been certain was about to ask me to go out with him. Instead he told me he wanted to hire my Breakup Doctor services, and I’d felt like a vain fool—at least, until Chip disastrously confessed that hiring me was indeed just a ruse to get close.

I wasn’t going to make either mistake again.

“Michael, I don’t have to tell you that working with me is a bad idea. You know better than that. And if this is just a way to try to start something between us, that’s not—”

“No, no—I don’t want to hire you, Brook. I want to help you.”

“You…What?”

Our ennui-filled server showed up with two bottles of Anchor Steam gripped in her left hand. In her right were a pair of cardboard coasters; she flung one down in front of each of us as if she were dealing cards. “Two Anchors, no mugs.” She set the beers in front of each of us. “You want food?”

“Can we have a few minutes?” Michael said.

She shrugged. “It’s your stomach.”

After she shuffled away, Michael put his arms on the table, leaning in and ignoring his beer. “Brook, what you’re doing…it’s so unique. Your column, the radio show, all your clients—you’re obviously good at this, and there’s obviously a market for it, judging by how fast you’ve turned this into a business. But you can reach, what, a handful of people you actually counsel one-on-one? Maybe you can do some group therapy or something, but outside of that and these local media outlets, it doesn’t scale up, am I right?”

He was startlingly right. My attempts to see more people than my office hours could allow had led to my starting group therapy sessions for the recently bereaved (of love) that I ran every Saturday. And it still bothered me when I was too busy to fit people in who needed acute help—like Nina Edelburg this morning, who’d called back after the show went off the air and asked about scheduling a series of sessions with me. My first available slot wasn’t until more than two weeks away—an eternity in the acute stages of a breakup. Michael’s quick insight into the limitations of my business model was impressive—and disconcerting.