Heart Conditions (The Breakup Doctor Series Book 3) (8 page)

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

He nodded once, fingers once again tapping out a complicated Morse code on the table. “And I know you—you’re probably working way too many hours and having trouble making sure you keep a work-life balance. And still feeling guilty that you aren’t able to do enough for people.”

I felt blood surge to my face. “Maybe,” I said, rather stiffly.

“I don’t think you have to push yourself so hard to reach all the people you probably want to reach. All you have to do is work smarter.”

I narrowed my gaze on him and framed my words carefully. “Look, I appreciate that you’ve obviously given a lot of thought to this, but this is my business. It’s not really any of yours.” I didn’t mean to sound harsh, but I was uncomfortable with his avid interest in my career. And, if I were honest, with how thoroughly my ex-fiancé still seemed to know me—and at how little I’d apparently changed.

He released that grin I knew so well, and I felt walls slam up into place. “Don’t get defensive. You’re right—it’s not my business. But promotion is. And I’m good at it, Brook—seriously good at it.
No
promoter gets a band signed the first time up at bat—no one. But I did—partly because I
am
good at this, but a lot of it had to do with them. They were damn talented. And so are you. That column in this morning’s paper? And I’ve read your other ones. It’s good advice—and you get a ton of comments posted every week, which tells me you know how to hit a cultural nerve. You’re a natural on the radio. You’re too good to be lost here in some rinky-dink beach town when you could be reaching a bigger audience. A much bigger audience. I’m talking about newspaper syndication. Magazines. Radio syndication. TV.”

Something inside me leaped at the picture Michael was painting. I’d long been thinking how to expand my Breakup Doctor practice, but always ran up against the wall that it wasn’t exactly something I could hire help for, or farm out to others. My business could grow only to the point that I could sustain my current pace, and I had resigned myself to being maxed out where I was.

If I could do more, reach more people…The idea held massive appeal.

But any enthusiasm I felt was overshadowed by anger—and hurt. Michael hadn’t come back here to ask my forgiveness, or tie up our badly frayed loose ends, or even to try to get me back, as I’d narcissistically convinced myself.

He’d simply seen a business opportunity.

“No,” I said flatly, forcing myself to stay planted in my seat and take a casual swig of my beer. Leaving in a wounded huff would only show Michael that he could still affect me—and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

Michael blinked. “No? Just no?” He stared at me intently, eyebrows bunched together, and then shifted his gaze down to the table. “Oh. This is because of me, isn’t it,” he said quietly. “Because of what I did.”

I gave a humorless laugh. “Believe it or not, Michael, it isn’t. My practice is quite different from what I used to do as a therapist when you knew me. I don’t know how to explain it to you in a way you’ll understand. It’s about personal connections. Heart. It’s not something I’m willing to turn into a Jerry Springer sideshow or some reality-TV garbage. Yes, I’m sure you could pimp the idea out and reach more people—but minus the soul of what I do.”

One corner of his mouth turned up in a rueful grin. “I deserved that. I didn’t mean to come on like a bulldozer. I guess…I’m just nervous.”

“Nervous about what?”

That half grin ghosted away. “About you, Brook. What else?”

The words sent an odd jolt through my chest—the intimacy of the way he said “you.” The way he spoke my name.

“Nervous about
what
,” I repeated, but this time my voice was thready.

He didn’t look up, shredding the ragged edge of his coaster with a fingernail, and I realized I’d been so distracted I’d missed his “tells”—fidgeting, breaking eye contact, the anxious busywork of his hands. I could see his Adam’s apple lift and fall as he swallowed and then finally answered.

“I really do admire what you’re doing, Brook. For the reason you said—it’s personal, it has real heart. And I think there’s so much opportunity to widen your reach, give more people the chance to take advantage of what you’re offering. But that’s not why I’m here.” He looked up, and the impact of his green eyes shooting directly into mine stopped my heart for a flash of a second. “I’m here for
you
. Because it took me much too long, and I’m scared as hell I’m way too late. But if I don’t try I’ll never be able to live with that.”

Every drop of saliva seemed to leave my mouth like a tide retreating before an oncoming tsunami.

“Try…what?” I croaked out after the long silence had grown suffocating.

“Us.”

For a second I forgot to breathe. It was exactly what I’d feared…and exactly what I’d once wanted most.

The most universally cherished breakup fantasy is this: that one day the person who dumped you will come crawling back, professing that he made a mistake, begging you to give him a second chance.

But now that that fantasy was here, I didn’t feel like crowing my triumph and rubbing Michael’s nose in all he’d thrown away. Nor did my pain magically feel erased. If anything, a supernova of sorrow exploded in my chest at his single, chest-quaking word. This felt almost…worse. Michael loved me. He wanted me back. The last two world-shattering years didn’t ever have to happen.

I ached with it.

But none of this exited my mouth in the form of words; I just sat staring, my head shaking side to side as if of its own accord.

“I’m not so stupid that I think we can pick back up where we left off,” Michael went on, oblivious to the whirlwind of thoughts crowding my head. “I blew that. But maybe…maybe we can start over? Slowly—I’m not pushing you. Let me date you. Let me know you again. Get to know
me
now, Brook—I’ve changed.”

I knew he had. Or I desperately wanted to believe it from what I’d seen since he came back. I’d changed too. For the better, I thought.

Was there a possibility that all we’d needed was time to grow up a little more?

He didn’t wait for me to come up with a reply, but reached across the table and took my cold hand in his, my fingers curling into his through sheer subconscious muscle memory.

“There’s still something here, Brook,” he said, his warm thumb stroking the back of my hand. “Please give me—us—another chance. I swear to God, I will not screw it up this time.”

It was hard to breathe, and Michael’s face had grown blurry where tears had clouded my vision.

The two years with this man had contained some of the best moments of my life. The two years since had encompassed some of the worst, after everything I’d thought was certain had been yanked out from beneath me. Because of Michael I’d hit lower than any rock-bottom I’d ever known before. I’d turned into someone half-crazed I barely recognized, frozen in place in my relationships to the point where I’d finally had to step completely away from them.

Wasn’t it just last night my heart was leaping at the thought of Ben and me getting back on track? How could I be thinking of Michael in the same way?

He was right, though. There had been something real between us. Something rare.

I wasn’t willing to completely shut that door.

But I wasn’t ready to throw it wide-open either.

I eased my hand out of his grasp, and reached into my purse to lay a ten on the table. Michael’s expression clouded.

“It…” My voice faltered, and I swallowed and started over. “It took me a long time to survive getting over you, Michael. I’m scared to risk having to do it again.”

“I can understand that,” he began. “But—”

“No—don’t say anything yet.” I pushed myself up out of the booth and stood looking down at his painfully, achingly dear face.

“I
am
willing to try for a friendship,” I said. “If you were serious about working with me to expand the Breakup Doctor practice we can try it.
Slowly
,” I added quickly when his face brightened. “And I have final approval on anything you do. Don’t give me your answer yet,” I said, holding up a hand when he opened his mouth to speak. “You have to swear you won’t try to win me over in the meantime. I’m too vulnerable where you’re concerned, and I have to know that I can let you back into my life a little bit without being frightened that you’ll take me over.” I looked down, blinking away moisture, and then met his eye again. “Give me some time to think about this. To get used to it. I can’t promise you I’ll be able to…to try again.”

His eyebrows drew together, and a wounded look crept into his eyes—only to clear like a passing storm at my next words:

“But I can’t promise you that I won’t.”

ten

I did not call Sasha.

I had to actually physically stop myself from doing it—by hiding my cell phone from myself just as I would after a breakup—but I already knew her feelings about Michael. I needed a little space to figure out mine. And yet after lying awake long into the night thinking about what he’d said, I still had no idea what I wanted.

At group therapy the next morning, I felt a little bit like a hypocrite.

Chrissie Tomas finished sharing and set the claw—the garden cultivator I’d brought in when I’d first started the group sessions to signify that whoever was holding it had the floor and was not to be interrupted—back in the center of the circle. She had been telling us for the last ten minutes why she was still constantly calling her boyfriend who’d dumped her two weeks ago—because he was also her best friend and she needed him to help her get through the breakup.

“You can’t be friends with your ex,” slipped automatically out of my mouth, and a few heads around the room nodded. It was one of my most strongly held tenets of breakups—trying to be pals with an ex while the breach was still fresh was like trying to heal a cut while you were still holding the razor to it.

“That’s insane,” Chrissie shot back hotly. “Are you supposed to just suddenly chop someone you care about out of your life forever? We’re not in high school.
Adults
can still be friends.”

I heard this a lot from clients unwilling to completely close the door. “Yes,” I said. “Ideally you’re right—maybe you can be friends again one day, if you’re both willing. But he can’t be your breakup buddy when your pain is the most raw. You’re asking Mark to help you get over
Mark
. He can’t wear both hats, Chrissie. The man who decided he doesn’t want to be with you anymore and broke your heart is the same Mark who you want to console you about it. Do you see the impossibility of that?”

Chrissie’s eyes filled with tears. “I still can’t believe it,” she said in an unsteady voice. “I know he loves me—half the time he’s the one calling me. Why doesn’t he want to be with me anymore?”

My own heart ached in sympathy. These were some of the worst kinds of breakups—when two people genuinely cared about each other, but the romance just didn’t work out. Losing a lover, a partner, a mate was bad enough. Losing your best friend on top of that, just when you needed one the most, was almost unbearable.

If I hadn’t had Sasha after Michael and I had broken up, I would have been exactly in Chrissie’s situation.

But Mark was making it even worse on Chrissie by staying in contact—and she was making it worse on
herself
. Although Michael’s disappearance after our broken engagement had shattered me, it was actually a kindness. It forced me to let the wound start to heal. Poor Chrissie was just having it ripped repeatedly back open.

“I don’t know,” I said gently. “I wish I did—sometimes it feels like at least having an answer will make things easier to bear.”

Chrissie nodded, not looking up. I leaned over to pluck a few tissues from the box I always kept at hand, offering them to her.

“It doesn’t, though,” I went on. “When someone has decided we’re not what they want anymore, it doesn’t help for them to explain exactly why. How about you guys—thoughts?” I asked the group.

Brett Rorbach, a stylish lady in her early thirties whose middle-aged boyfriend left her for a much older woman, raised a hand, and I nodded.

“You can’t be friends with someone who deliberately hurt you,” she said. “That’s not what friends do.”

“Amen,” said Kiki LeKerr, whose last relationship ended when her boyfriend, who’d been separated, got back together with his wife. “You cut that son of a bitch out of your life like a cancer.”

“Hold on—you can’t just start hating someone you loved,” Victor Underwood said. He’d left his girlfriend for an old flame, only to find out quickly that there was a reason it had burned out before. But the woman he broke up with refused to give him a second chance, and Victor had been suffering for it ever since. “That’s childish, like Chrissie said. Can’t we act like grown-ups? If you liked someone well enough to want to be with them in a relationship, hopefully you liked them enough to be friends. Right?”

One of the benefits of group therapy, I’d learned over the last months, was that often having everyone talk out issues among themselves let them find their own way to an answer. Even in one-on-one therapy, getting a client to see the truth for themselves was a lot more impactful than my spoon-feeding it to them, but it always went faster in a group round table.

“I think you guys are all right, to a degree.”

Brett grinned. “You always say that.”

“Maybe,” I said with an acknowledging smile. “But it’s usually true. Nothing’s black-and-white, and you all present various facets of all the issues that come up in here.” I turned to Chrissie, whose tears had dried as she’d followed the discussion intently. “I’d like to think we could be friends with the people we’ve cared deeply about…even if we choose not to be with them romantically.” I was thinking of Michael, but fresh on the heels of that an image of Ben flitted across my mind, and I added, “Or if we
can’t
. But maintaining a connection with them while the pain is still so fresh only makes it harder for us to move past it. It’s like asking the guy who just shot you to please help you take out the bullet.”

A watery laugh erupted from Chrissie, and a few chuckles echoed around the room.

I leaned forward in my chair. “All I’m suggesting is that you give yourself some room from that pain. Don’t tell yourself you have to cut Mark out of your life forever—that hurts even worse, doesn’t it?” She nodded furiously. “Okay. So think of this as just for right now. Sometimes getting over a breakup is like any other substance addiction. We can take a page from AA: One day at a time.”

“That’s right,” Victor spoke up. “If I told myself I could never have another glass of Scotch, I promise you guys I’d be sitting here tanked out of my gourd right now. But
today
I won’t have that glass. That I can do.”

I looked at Victor, who’d never confessed to us before that he’d had a drinking issue. “Thanks for sharing that, Victor.”

On the other side of him, Chrissie bobbed her head and echoed, “Yeah, thanks.”

I returned my gaze to her. “So tell yourself that just for today, you won’t call Mark. If he calls you, you’ll ask him to give you some space—just for a while. When you break your leg you know you’re going to need crutches for a little while to get back on your feet, right?”

“Right,” she said quietly.

“Okay. So for now, some distance from Mark is your crutches. Once that leg heals you won’t need them anymore—and that’s when you can try for a friendship again, if you still want one.”

“And how long will that take?” she asked me, a vulnerable, pleading expression on her face that gripped my heart.

I offered her a rueful smile. “I wish I knew,” I said honestly, wondering whether I’d tossed my own crutches away too soon where Michael—and Ben—were concerned.

I knew I couldn’t put off telling Sasha about Michael any longer—I told her everything, and the truth was, I needed her as a sounding board to figure out what I wanted to do.

But once again I rolled into voicemail. Sasha’s phone was attached to her hand almost as securely as her fingers were; there was no way she missed my call.

For some reason she was still dodging me. And it was past time I figured out why.

As soon as I left the Fort Myers Yacht Club conference room, where we held the group sessions, I dialed my brother.

“Hey, sis,” he answered, and I waited for his usual follow-up—something childish like “’Sup?” or “What’s shakin’?” or “How’s it hangin’?” But that was all he said.

“Hey, Stuvie.” I registered the buzzing sound in the background. “Where are you?”

“Dad and I are headed out fishing.”

“Oh. Where’s Sash?”

“She wanted me to get out of her hair for the day.”

I frowned. “Everything okay with you two?”

I heard a loud rustling, as if he’d shifted position into the wind, and then after a moment it settled.

“Why do you ask?” His voice was low, and he sounded cagey.

“She seemed weird the other night. And she’s avoiding my calls. Is she all right?”

Another long silence filled only with the sporadic sounds of the boat motor, as our connection got spotty. He and Dad tended to go out on the gulf pretty far. “I don’t know.”

I frowned. “What’s going on?”

After a moment I made out, “…can’t…have to ask…”

“Stu.” I used the tone that always made my little brother confess any transgression to me when we were kids. “Are you fooling around on her?”

“What?” he yelped. “No! I can’t bel…”—the connection faltered—“…ask me that, Brook!”

His horrified tone was too genuine for me to doubt him. “Then what’s going on?”

“…can’t hear you. Just ask…”

“Stuvie—”

“…you later—” The connection dropped.

I stood on the asphalt holding the phone, staring at the line of royal palms bordering the yacht club’s parking lot as they rustled in the breeze. It seemed like the problem wasn’t on Stu’s end—at least, not as far as he knew. And I hadn’t done anything to upset Sasha that I could think of.

So if she was afraid to tell me something, I thought with dawning horror, that left only one logical thing I could think of.

Sasha was about to break my brother’s heart.

I’m not proud of the fact that I ambushed her, but I really didn’t see any other choice. When I called Sasha she once again let me roll into voicemail.

So thirty minutes after I hung up with Stu, I was standing on the concrete walkway outside her apartment, and I came bearing gifts (okay, bribes): a cardboard tray with two lattes in one hand, and a bag of fresh, still-warm cinnamon rolls from Merritt’s Bakery in the other. Even Sasha couldn’t resist their cream cheese frosting.

“Knock, knock!” I hollered cheerfully. No answer.

Her car was parked right outside, though, so I balanced on one leg and kicked the door with my foot—perhaps slightly less delicately than I meant to. “Hey, rise and shine, lazybones. I don’t care how late you and Stu were out last night; I have cinnamon rolls from Merritt’s and I’m going to eat them all unless—”

The door swung open and I almost kicked my best friend in the shin.

“Will you please stop shouting like a crazy person?”

It took me a moment to get my tongue working. Sasha—who could wake up from a two-day bender looking like she’d just walked off a magazine cover shoot—looked horrible. Her eyelids were puffy and raw, as if she’d moisturized with poison oak, the skin underneath sunken and dark. Her hair had clearly been untroubled by a brush today, and her face was free of makeup, just a sheet crease that shot down her left cheek like a lightning bolt. Most alarming of all, she was wearing a faded and worn pair of baggy pajama bottoms of some kind of flannel—a material I’d have sworn up and down would never touch her body—and a shapeless oversize green hoodie that said
Panama City, Spring Break 2000
across the chest.

“What
happened
?” I asked, aghast.

She frowned, still planted in the wedge of open door with her hand firmly around the edge of it. “I’m not feeling great, Brook. I just need to sleep, okay?” She started to shut the door, but I quickly shoved one Birkenstock against it, coffee sloshing across my fingers.

I winced, ignoring the burn. “Then I’ll nurse you,” I insisted. “What was Stu thinking, leaving you to go fishing? He should be here taking care of you.”

“No!” she barked, and then blinked, as if surprised by her own sharp tone. “No, I told him to go. It’s okay, Brook, really. Thanks for coming by. I’ll call you lat—”

“No,” I said, not budging. I dropped all my false cheer. “Don’t insult me, Sash,” I said quietly. “If you don’t want to talk to me about it, you don’t have to. But please don’t pretend I’m going to buy that you’re sick. That’s not what’s going on. Is it?”

Her tangle of blond hair fell forward, obscuring her face as she stared down at the floor. A dark round spot appeared on the terra-cotta tile in the entryway—and then another one—and then I realized my best friend was crying.

I all but dropped the coffees and bakery bag to the concrete walkway and took her in my arms. “Sash…” I said helplessly. “Sash…What is it? What’s wrong?”

She was clutching onto me like a life raft, and now she was sobbing—I could feel her body heave, but she still made no sound, and that was the most awful part of all. Histrionics from my dramatic best friend I could handle—I was used to it. This silent, racking grief felt too deep for me to know how to reach.

I led her inside and onto her red velvet sofa and held her for a long time, saying nothing, just gripping her tight and stroking her shoulder, her back, her hair, the pit in my stomach yawing wider.

Finally she grew still and her breathing evened out, and I relaxed my hold on her enough to pull away and look her in the face. Or try. Her head was still bent down, her dull gaze on the carpet.

“Tell me, Sash,” I said, bracing myself for the worst. “We’ll get through it—whatever it is. I swear to you.”

Usually even in tears Sasha was gorgeous, but now she looked…like normal sloppy-crying humans. I reached up to wipe her face, but she didn’t even seem to register my touch.