Chapter 34
ONE BEAT AT A TIME
LANEY
“Ithink she’s waking up. Laney? Can you hear me?”
The first thing I noticed when I woke up in the hospital was the regular beep of a heart rate monitor. Slowly, I opened my eyes and immediately closed them again. Everything was too bright. The white ceiling. The fluorescent lights. Even the streetlamp flickering off Megan’s hair.
Megan.
I squinted one eye open again. Then the other.
Megan was grinning down at me. “Hey there. Welcome back to the land of the living.”
I groaned. My throat was sore. My chest was sore too, and I was so, so tired. “What happened?”
My dad appeared on my other side, face creased with worry and his thinning hair standing up like he’d been running his hand through it for hours. “Hey, kiddo. You’re at the hospital.”
My eyes popped fully open now. “I—what? No, I don’t want to—”
As I started to move, several sensors apparently attached to different parts of me went off.
Almost immediately, a woman in a pair of purple scrubs hurried into the room. “Welcome back, Ms. Fisher. You’re in the cardiac wing at the University of Washington Hospital. My name’s Halima. I’m the nurse on duty right now.”
“I don’t want surgery,” I croaked. “I didn’t ask for—”
“No, you didn’t, but you needed it.” Halima flicked a few buttons off and helped me to sit back in my bed. “Which is why Dr. Palmer finished your ablation two hours ago. You’re just now coming out of anesthesia.”
Already, I was too tired to fight. Instead, as the nurse proceeded to record a number of vitals, I sank back into the pillows and turned to face Megan and Dad. My best friend’s face was red, her eyes swollen from obvious crying.
“You,” she gritted through her teeth, “scared the crap out of me. Don’t ever do that again.”
“Goes for me too, Laney bug.” Dad reached over to squeeze the hand that didn’t currently have an IV coming out of the top.
I swallowed, back to feeling bleary. “I—they did the surgery?”
“We did.”
We all turned as Dr. Palmer entered the room, carrying a clipboard. He smiled kindly. “You know, Laney, when I asked you to come in for a consultation, I didn’t mean to the ER.”
I managed a rueful smile. “Well, I like to go big or go home, I guess.”
He rewarded my weak joke with a chuckle. Dad joined him, albeit hesitantly. Megan didn’t seem to think it was funny at all.
“Anyway, I wanted to stick around until you came out of surgery. Walk you through what happened and everything we did. You gave your friends and family a bit of a scare.”
I listened as the doctor laid out everything that had happened. After I blacked out in my apartment, the cops radioed in for an ambulance. One of them did chest compressions while the other got an AED from the squad car.
“You were lucky they were able to shock you so quickly,” he said. “You were already coming around when the EMTs arrived.”
Once I arrived, Dr. Palmer rushed me into surgery to perform the operation that essentially destroyed the extra electrical signal in my heart.
“It was a complex ablation procedure, in part because you were already under distress, and in part because the accessory pathway was so close to your normal pathways, but I’m happy to tell you that the cryoablation was successful.”
I blinked. “What does that mean?”
Megan rubbed my shoulder. “It means they got the sucker, babe.”
Dr. Palmer. “Although up to twenty percent of WPW patients may require an additional ablation to keep their symptoms under control, there is still a strong likelihood that once you recover, your heart will function normally.” When I still stared at him blankly, he nodded at Megan and my dad.
“In other words, your friend is correct. We got the sucker.”
By the time he was finished, I was shaking. Not because of a chill, but out of shock.
Just like that, the condition I’d been living with for years was gone. My fears remained, but slowly, they would realize they didn’t need to stay.
Why had I waited so long to do this?
And what must Ronan—oh, God, Ronan.
I turned to Megan. “What happened to—?”
“In a second.” Like any good best friend, she knew exactly what I was thinking. “Doctor, do you need anything else?”
Dr. Palmer shook his head. “I’ll come back in about an hour to check on you before I leave for the night. Just get some rest and recover, Laney.”
Only after he left did Dad and Megan turn to me.
“Honey,” my dad started.
“Where. Is. He?” My voice was still croaky, but stronger now.
“I—” Megan looked genuinely uneasy. “We don’t know. The detective brought him to the squad car while the other two police were working on you. He was going crazy. I called the police after you went into surgery, and they wouldn’t tell us anything. Laney, whoa, you can’t get out of bed.”
Again, it took my IV line tugging on my hand again to remind me that I had to stay put. “We have to call Liam Kelly.”
“Who’s that?” Dad wondered.
“Ronan’s best friend,” I said. “And we should probably call his brother, Brendan, too. I have his girlfriend’s number in my phone, I think, and—”
“That won’t be necessary.”
The three of us turned to greet two new visitors who had entered the room: Liam Kelly… and Owen Black.
“Oh, hi. Owen, isn’t it? Good to see you again.” Dad stood to offer handshakes to both men. “Hi, I’m Jan Fisher, Laney’s father.”
“Liam Kelly. Pleasure.”
Owen, looking uncertain, turned to me. “Laney—”
“You should not be here,” Megan cut in. “This is a space for recovery, and it’s almost midnight—”
“It’s also a place that’s willing to break the rules for large donations,” Liam said, more than a little wryly.
I looked between the two men, both of whom held the same posture that Ronan had in places like these—one built on the knowledge that the rules for regular people didn’t apply to them.
Even with a bruised face and a nose brace, Owen still managed to look like he expected to get his way, and Liam, even if he wasn’t a part of the family, was close enough to them that he had learned their mannerisms and posture.
In fact, right now, he kind of resembled them.
But while Ronan typically walked a fine line between arrogant and charming, Owen and Liam were just plain on the wrong side of it.
Still, I knew there was no use in arguing.
“Fine,” I said. “You’re here. Do you know where Ronan is?”
Liam and Owen exchanged glances, then cast another awkward glance at Megan and my dad.
Megan seethed, but Dad stood. “Megan, let’s give them some privacy to talk. Get some tea and see if Laney can have some ice chips.” He turned to me. “You all right, kiddo?”
I nodded. “Just give us a few minutes.”
The door closed behind them, and only then did Liam move to the foot of the bed, though Owen remained by the door, looking like he would rather be anywhere else.
“How are you feeling?” Liam asked, somewhat inanely.
“Like I just had emergency heart surgery after seeing my husband taken away in handcuffs,” I snapped, albeit a bit weakly. “Where is he?”
There was no doubt in my mind that Liam knew. He was the company’s main counsel, and probably one of the few people besides me Ronan even came close to trusting.
Liam glanced at Owen, who nodded. “He was transported back to Las Vegas to face a judge on charges of murder.”
Murder. It was even worse than I’d thought.
“When’s the arraignment?” I asked.
“In two days. I’ll be there to represent him.”
I nodded. “I want to go too.”
Again, the two men exchanged glances. This time, Owen shook his head.
“Laney, even though I came here hoping that might be possible, it’s obviously not,” Liam said. “We spoke to your doctor, and you can’t fly for at least a week. Maybe two.”
No. This wasn’t happening. “Fine, then I’ll drive. We can leave tonight.”
Liam just looked sorry for me. “Again, I don’t think that’s going to work. Your doctor said you need to stay for observation for at least twenty-four hours, if not longer.”
This wasn’t happening.
I closed my eyes, and all I could see was Ronan’s mournful expression, paired with his directions to live my life, finish my PhD, be happy. They weren’t the directions of someone who thought he would see me again. They were the words of someone saying goodbye for good.
I wanted to scream.
I turned to Owen, who was now staring up at the ceiling with pain I didn’t think was related to his broken nose. “And you? What do you have to say about all of this?”
His gaze met mine, and for a moment, he looked so like his brother, my whole chest ached with longing. “I’m thinking… this is my fault.”
“Owen, stop. You had nothing to do with what went down in Vegas,” Liam put in.
“Don’t I?”
The words were a snarl, and I saw very clearly what Simone had meant when she thought all the Black children were, in some way, just wounded animals. Owen in particular reminded me of a lone wolf with his paw caught in a trap.
“She deserves to know,” he went on. “She deserves to know what we did to him.”
I stared. “What was that?”
“Owen…” Liam’s voice now carried a note of warning. “As your lawyer, I’m telling you to stop—”
“Stop what?” Owen snapped. “She’s his wife. You told me yourself they can’t force her to testify against him.”
“Yes, but they can force her to testify against you!” Liam exploded.