Heart Conditions (The Breakup Doctor Series Book 3) (15 page)

“Being a parent?” she said in a wobbly voice after a few moments. “It’s like someone else’s life—a grown-up’s life.” She blew her nose daintily into the tissue. “I don’t know how to do that. This—tonight—is what I’m good at. I talk to people for my interviews at work. I flirt. I make party chitchat. But it’s
all
I’m good at. How can I be somebody’s mommy? I have no idea how to deal with children. I know how to talk to
adults
, not babies.”

Her words sparked a sudden memory, and an idea began to hatch in my head—crazy maybe, but maybe exactly what my friend needed. Despite the deflated tone of her voice, I began to grin.

“So I know we said we were going to give Operation Bring It On a rest,” I said, “but I might have an idea for something that could help. What are you and Stu doing tomorrow night?”

She frowned. “I don’t know. It’s Friday, so normally we’d be going out, but we’ll probably stay home and go to bed at nine, if your brother has his way. I’m made of eggshells now, remember,” she said bleakly. “And you know the worst thing?”

“What?”

“He’s right—I’m too exhausted to keep my eyes open most of the time lately. This remora inside me is literally sucking away all my energy.” But as she said it she cupped a hand protectively over her belly, and that insistent spark of hope flamed to life again.

“Don’t worry about Stu,” I told her. “I’ve got that in hand, and he’s going to chill out.”

“What did you—”

“Not important. I’ll pick you up at bedtime tomorrow evening—I mean nine.” Sasha glared, but I just grinned at her, releasing the door lock. When she hesitated, frowning at me, I gave her a gentle shove on the shoulder. “Just trust me. And be ready for a late night.”

fifteen

Michael was already sitting in one of the chairs along the opposite wall after my last client the next afternoon—on Fridays I wrapped up by four so I could make it to my radio show on time, but today I’d taken my last client at two so we could meet for an hour to discuss how things were going with Michael’s plan for my business.

Paige was still at her desk when I stepped out of my office, though I’d told her at lunch she could leave early.

“Oh,” I said, stopping abruptly. “I see you two have met.”

“Before, actually,” Michael said with a wink to Paige, whose expression remained stony. Stonier than usual. “Paige here is a mean plant wrangler.”

The peace lily still sat on the floor in front of the window, mute testimony to the door I’d reopened with Michael.

“I can stay for a while longer, if you need me to.” She was eyeballing Michael as she said it.

I wanted to smile, but bit it back. Paige had clearly picked up on the history between the two of us and was being protective. Fondness for her flooded me. For all her literalness and serious demeanor, Intern Paige had great instincts and plenty of compassion.

“Thanks, Paige—I really appreciate it,” I said sincerely. “But I can handle…whatever’s left to do today. I know you probably have homework to tackle.”

She frowned. “Well, no, it’s not homework. At this stage of my education it’s research for my disserta—”

I held up a hand. “Figure of speech. My bad. Thanks, Paige—have a good night.”

She gathered her things and left, casting a baleful glance at Michael as she did that made me wonder whether Sasha had been planting a bug in her ear about him. There were few women Michael couldn’t manage to win over, and that seemed a likely explanation.

But so did the more likely fact that Intern Paige was utterly oblivious to frivolous charm.

“Come on back,” I said to Michael, gesturing toward my office.

He stopped just inside the doorway, taking in the room: My desk, bought secondhand at a business-consignment shop downtown, with its vintage wooden roller chair that I loved (it made me feel like Sigmund Freud). The forest-green chaise along the near wall where my clients sat, a butterscotch-colored armchair catty-corner from it. The IKEA shelves lining the far wall adjacent to my desk, so clients would have something of interest to look at over my shoulder when rising emotions made it difficult to maintain eye contact, and where I’d gleefully unpacked the boxes of books—psychology and otherwise—that had sat in my parents’ attic for years. My old Goosebumps books sat beside psych texts from college, Grimm’s fairy tales alongside lit classics, several rows of popular fiction above shelves of how-to and self-help titles.

“Wow,” Michael said. “You finally got your dream office.”

He remembered. All my life I’d wanted a comfortable, homey, book-lined workspace for my practice, and this room was one of the first things I’d tackled when I started renovating my house.

“You want the chaise, or is that too therapy-ish?” I asked, gesturing toward it. “You can have the armchair if you’re more comfortable.”

But he remained standing. “Can I see the rest?”

“The rest?”

“Your house. I’d love to see it.”

“Oh…” I hesitated. It felt odd and slightly dangerous to bring Michael into my private spaces, but I couldn’t think of a reasonable way to turn down such an innocuous request. “Sure. Come on.”

I led him back out of the office. “You already saw the waiting room, of course. And the office lavatory?” I indicated the bathroom with an arm.

Michael shook his head. “I haven’t seen that yet. That’s really nice,” he said, peering in at the tile and stonework around the vanity and tub, the shiny glass accent tiles and oil-rubbed-bronze fixtures.

“Thanks,” I said, feeling a rush of pride. “That was the first project my dad and I worked on. Out of necessity,” I said with a chuckle, remembering. “This wall was eaten up with mold.” I pointed behind the tub. “Once we had to tear it all down pretty much to the studs, it seemed a shame not to fix it up as nicely as we could.”

“Your dad’s always been a magician with stuff like this.”

I stopped, turning to face him. At one time Michael and my father had seemed close, and I was reminded that Michael had suffered other losses when the two of us fell apart. “Yeah. He is.”

I took him into the living room next, where he admired the Venetian plaster-textured walls and the stained-concrete floor. He grinned. “Your dad again?”

A sliver of pain sliced into my heart as I remembered Ben with his industrial diamond sander, smoothing the floor into a glasslike finish before we artfully applied the stain; Ben patiently showing me the nuances of the faux-plaster technique, helping me over and over again until the texture actually looked intentional, instead of like a bucket of stucco had exploded on the wall.

“No,” I said quietly. “Someone else helped me in here.”

Michael turned to look directly at me, his gaze intent. “Someone…you dated?” he asked, and I wasn’t surprised that he’d read me so easily. I nodded, and his face crumpled like a sinkhole.

“You dated?” he repeated, as if the words made no sense to him.

“It’s been two years, Michael. Of course I dated.”

He shook his head. “No, but…someone who did all this…it was serious. Wasn’t it?”

I looked away, at the cinnamon-colored wall that lit up orange in the setting sun. “It was. For a while.”

He made no reply. After a few silent moments he turned away from me, pointing toward the other doorway in the living room. “That’s to the rest of the house?”

I was so grateful for the change of subject I trotted right over and led him into my kitchen and den area. “I haven’t really done much back here yet,” I explained as he took in the ancient pressed-wood cabinetry and Formica countertops, the cracked Saltillo tiles in the adjacent den.

We walked out onto the lanai, furnished with my Big Lots sale outdoor set, and into my overgrown backyard before going back inside. I hesitated at the door to my master bedroom. Jake was in there—for some reason he’d devolved into full-on play mode during my last session, doing the bouncing bunny in front of my last client, diving into a hopeful downward dog, tail wagging, and barking in the man’s face. I’d finally had to excuse myself long enough to escort him into solitary confinement in my bedroom so we could finish the session in peace.

“Brace yourself,” I warned as I opened the door, and Jake wormed through the opening the moment it was wide enough for his body, nearly knocking Michael over with his gregarious hello.

“You remember Jake,” I said dryly.

Michael looked up from where he was stroking the dog’s neck. “Jake? I thought your dog’s name was Spike?”

My face heated with a blush I was sure he could see. “Um…right. I just sort of said that, actually. He’s Jake. And he’s not mine. I’m keeping him for a…a friend.”

I turned away to avoid Michael’s searching look, gesturing into the bedroom. “I haven’t done anything in here yet at all, really. Well, except pull up the carpet, as you can see,” I said, indicating the gray concrete floor scattered with cheap rag rugs. “It was about thirty years old, and I couldn’t fathom putting my bare feet on it,” I explained. “And there used to be curtains and a nicer bedspread, but…” I dwindled off, remembering the first night I’d ever had Ben’s crazy dog, when a traumatized, confused Jake had eaten pretty much every textile in the room when I’d left him here alone for a few hours. I blinked away the memory, turning a determined smile to Michael.

He looked as if I’d struck him.

“Michael? What’s wrong?”

“It’s just…” He stopped, cleared his throat, tried again. “This would have been ours. We’d have been the ones doing all this together if I hadn’t—”

“No,” I cut him off quickly. “It wouldn’t have. This house was my reaction to…to what happened. I rushed into buying it to prove—to myself and everyone else—that I was fine. But I never would have ended up here otherwise. You and I never would have bought a derelict like this.” I turned away from the bedroom, leading us back out to the living room. I ran my hand along the wall as we walked, Jake weaving through us as if trying to trip us. “It’s funny, though,” I said, without turning back to Michael. “It’s a wreck, and it needs so much work, and I bought it for all the wrong reasons in a terrible state of mind. But…I love it. It’s mine.”

“It’s you,” he said quietly from behind me.

It was. But it was also all the people I loved—my dad, Sasha and Stu, who’d worked alongside me on the smaller projects.

Ben.

“Let’s go back to my office,” I said brusquely.

I took a seat in my chair, Jake planting himself beside me, and Michael sat on the chaise.

“Well, first things first,” he said, pulling his laptop from his messenger bag. “They said no.”

“Who said no to what?”

“KXAR. I set up a meeting with the general manager and laid out our case for your own show, and he said they couldn’t offer you that.”

I felt a dull flutter of disappointment, but I wasn’t surprised. “Oh, well. We tried.”

He snorted. “Tried, hell. I told them you quit.”

“You
what
?”

“Relax. This is how the game is played.”

There ensued a good four solid minutes of my haranguing, complaining, and accusing Michael of making huge unilateral decisions without my okay, before he was able to get a single word in.

“They’re talking about an offer,” he said calmly when I finally wound down.

“What?”

“The station manager is meeting with the owner to discuss what they can offer you, and he said he’ll get back to me. That’s what I was trying to tell you. You have to trust the power of no.”

My heart slowed back to a life-sustaining pace. “Geez, Michael.
Lead
with that next time, would you? And also…
ask
me what to do before you just do it. I thought that’s what we agreed on.”

“I did ask! You said go ahead.”

“I said go ahead on starting to negotiate! Not go ahead and tender my resignation!”

“Fair enough,” he conceded. “Then do you also want to see the offer for you to be one of the main speakers for a traveling relationship seminar before I accept it for you?”

“What?”
I was a bit one-note today.

He chuckled. “It’s called Relationship Town Hall—it’s run by this dating guru up in New York who takes the show to various towns and hires local relationship experts to be panelists in each city. Attendees come to discuss love and dating, and then afterward there’s a mix-and-mingle for them, like a singles event. It’s been gaining a lot of traction and media coverage—how have you not heard about this, in your line of work?”

That was a good question. It certainly sounded like something I should have been aware of. “I don’t know. How did
you
know about it?”

“I just dug around a little on the internet. Anyway, I approached the guy who started it—his name’s Rod Traynor; maybe you’ve heard of him? He’s on
GMA
a lot and has a column in
HuffPost
.”

“Really—Rod? The dating guru is named
Rod
?”

“You’re a child,” he said, but he was grinning. “I gave him a rundown on what you do and your CV, and he was really interested—wants to talk about possibly booking you for the panel in the Tampa, Miami, and Jacksonville shows, if you’re up for it.”

“Holy cow, Michael,” I said, stunned. “You really are good at this.”

He sighed. “Why do you and Sasha keep sounding so surprised when you say that?”

Where was this motivated, together,
adult
version of Michael when he and I were dating? I couldn’t help thinking how different our lives might look right now if he’d found this side of himself sooner. This guy knew what he wanted and how to get it, and wasn’t afraid of growing up.
This
guy would never have walked out on his fiancée.

I shook off the thought, turning my laptop so Michael could see the screen.

“Okay, like you asked I made a bullet list of possible topics I could write about as guest blogs. Some of them are based on articles I’ve done for my column, but I have a lot of new ones too.”

He had good feedback—helping me tweak broad topics into sharper focus, and suggesting which ones might be best for initial pitches to the bigger sites—but I could tell he was preoccupied. Finally I looked up from the screen.

“What’s the matter? Are these not what you were looking for?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, they’re great.”

“Michael.” I leaned back in my chair, regarding him. “I know you. What’s wrong with this?”

“Nothing, Brook, honestly. It’s good stuff.” Our eyes had a Mexican stand-off for a few long beats, and then finally he said, “It’s…I know you wanted to keep our personal stuff out of”—he made a stirring gesture encompassing my laptop and desk and the area between us—“this. It’s just…harder than I thought. I’m a little thrown by the guy who helped you fix the house. That you seriously dated another guy.”

“Two, actually.” I said it without thinking, but a hot flush of shame rose in the words’ wake as his face fell. Despite my professed forgiveness of Michael, I wondered whether part of me was still deliberately trying to hurt him.