Chapter 30
Mackenzie
“What’re you doing here?” The way Mom clutched at my arm, the weak grip, had me turning her hand over in mine and cling on for her. “Honey, you’re supposed to be in Australia.”
“Plenty of people have rhythm disorders.” That blithe tone, I knew it well.
She only used it when she was trying to minimise how bad things were.
It’d been the one she used when we hunkered down, watching a wildfire tear through the hills.
“They live with it every day.” Her gaze hardened as she stared at the door.
“Something I told the doctors here. Mackenzie.” Her fingers tightened around mine.
“You need to get me out of here. The neighbours found me…” It felt like there was a hand around my chest, and now it was squeezing.
“They called a damn ambulance, which will need to be paid for somehow.”
There was something I did not like at all in her expression when she met my gaze. Desperation.
“We need to leave. Every minute I stay here, every test, is costing more money.”
And that’s when I understood. Medical debt was a spectre that seemed to haunt a whole lot of us. Losing my health insurance was almost worse than losing my job. It meant anything that went wrong could bankrupt me.
And Mom was facing the same reality.
“This hospital is out of network,” she said. “My insurance will only cover a small amount of the cost. Mackenzie, they’re talking surgery and you know how expensive that will be.”
What was the alternative? I wanted to scream, but the persistent beeping of the heart rate machine silenced me. Her pulse was picking up and even I knew that was bad.
“We’ll find a way,” I said, giving her hand a squeeze. “Don’t worry. Just relax—”
“I can’t relax, not until I’m home,” she said. “The house, my animals—”
“All taken care of.” That masculine voice had me stiffening and every muscle locked tight, not wanting to turn around. “Hi, Mom.” Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw Sandra rise to her feet, presenting her cheek, so Alex could press a kiss to it. “How’re our girls doing?”
“Our. Girls?”
Who said that? Me apparently, the words ground out between clenched teeth.
“Hey, baby.” I knew that warm tone, that smile, because it’d haunted my nightmares for months.
Alex sauntered over, reaching for me like he had a right to.
My hand was out, enforcing a distance between us without thought.
He blinked when my palm slapped down on his chest, stopping him from getting any closer.
Frowning slightly, he recovered fast. “How was your flight?”
“What the hell is he doing here?” I snapped, unable to keep the question down. Sandra flushed, making clear who the guilty party was.
“Alex…?” Mom croaked and that had me springing into action.
“Outside,” I hissed at him, pitching my voice low. “Now.”
“Man…” Alex shook his head as he looked me up and down, then leant against the corridor wall. “You look amazing, babe. Come—”
“You don’t get to call me that,” I said, then looked around guiltily.
Right when I was supposed to be making sure my mom got the care she needed, I was having to talk to assholes like this?
It was peak Alex, I realised. Making every damn thing about him since we were small children and he was doing the same now. “You don’t…”
During therapy, I’d dreamed of this moment. The time when I could finally get some closure. I’d spew out the poison that turned my gut to acid, all over him. But as I drew in a breath to do just that, something stopped me. It wasn’t anger or fear of making a scene.
I just didn’t care.
I took in the well-styled blond hair and the perfectly tailored suit and just saw a guy. A good looking one, and yet nothing about him moved me. That was enough to have me stepping back and away from him.
“I’m not doing this with you.” I loved how calm my voice was. “I’m not doing anything with you going forward. Flying from one end of the world to the other means I don’t have a lot of spoons left, and right now I need to use every bit of energy I have looking after Mom.”
“And money, right?” All of my previous calm evaporated in the face of his cocky smile. “I mean a hospital like this…” He made a show of inspecting the hallway. “It’d have to be expensive. An article I was reading said that even a Tylenol costs hundreds of dollars.”
I couldn’t deal with that right now. Mom, I thought. I needed to make sure my mother was OK.
“Do they have good health insurance Down Under?” There was a sneer at the last two words. “Something that will cover your mother’s care?”
“What the hell do you want?” I asked.
“You.” If this was six months ago, I’d have swooned at that intent gaze, that possessive tone, but that was a whole other Mackenzie.
Going to Australia was an attempt to find myself again and what I discovered was I saw through Alex’s shit completely.
“I’ve been working hard, making a lot of sales, Mackenzie. For us.”
He edged closer.
“I can cover the bills for you, make sure Kimberley gets the best care. Hell, if there’s a better specialist at another hospital, we can get your mom transferred there.
I made a mistake, babe, thought I wasn’t ready to settle down, but I know now you’re the girl for me. If this is what it takes to prove it…”
His eyes widened as I stumbled back. Anything to stop him from touching me. There was a bone-deep revulsion there that came from him being in close proximity and it got worse the nearer he got.
“There is no us.” God, it felt good to say that. “Go home, Alex. Go home or just…” Part of me couldn’t believe this was the man I ate my heart over for all those months. “Go away.”
Turning on my heel and marching back into the room filled me with a sense of rightness, right up until I sank down into the chair beside Mom’s bed.
“Mackenzie, are you—?” she rasped.
“Let’s worry about you,” I said, patting her hand and smiling.
And I got plenty of opportunity to do just that when I met with the doctor.
“The trouble is,” the man in the white coat said, “is we’ve exhausted all the conservative measures to slow down your mother’s heart rate. An erratic rhythm is hard to live with, but plenty of people have it and live perfectly healthy lives.”
Just a tiny second of hope, right before he crushed it.
“But when her heart rate continues to beat too fast, you run the risk of a whole host of health issues. Light headedness and fainting, as happened when your mother was found by her neighbours, but worse than that. When the heart beats too rapidly, it doesn’t pump the blood around the body effectively.
That can result in cardiomyopathy or even cardiac arrest.”
“Heart attack…?” I gasped out the word, unable to believe what he was saying. Mom was only in her late fifties and was the strongest woman I knew. The thought… I swallowed hard. “So an ablation is the only way forward?”
“It’s a major operation.” My hands gripped the armrests of my chair as the doctor spoke. “But it’s one with a high success rate. Not without its risk, obviously, but the outcomes of not performing the surgery are likely to be tragic.”
But how much will it cost? That’s what I wanted to know. It seemed small, petty to be quibbling about money when my mom’s life was on the line, but what else could I do? We knew people that had been financially wiped out by medical debt and now we were facing the same reality.
“So, the costs?” I croaked out.
The doctor frowned, compounding the feelings of shame. He shook his head, then sat back in his chair.
“You can talk to our financial department about that. If you’re happy to go ahead with the surgery, we can book your mother in tomorrow…”
Forms were presented and signed. Information pamphlets were pushed my way. Everything happened with a growing sense of unreality, which left me stumbling back to Mom’s bed.
“So are we getting out of here?” she asked, trying to sit up.
“No, I’ve found a way to make this work,” I replied and that was the moment when I understood my mother the best. She’d lied to me like that as a child, hoping to spare my feelings.
Shouldering the fear, the guilt, the anger, Mom left me to skip along, oblivious.
The least I could do was the same for her right now.
I just wasn’t sure how.
Sleeping in the chair beside Mom’s bed was not great, but the next day I went down to the cafeteria to grab a coffee and some breakfast. Mom was fasting in preparation for the surgery and I…
I needed at least some caffeine to get me through the next stage.
The biggest risk during an ablation was just after the surgery.
They used this device that went through a major artery in your thigh to perform the surgery and so she would have to stay perfectly still afterwards until a clot formed.
As I stood in line, all the confusing, horrifying details hit me as I tried to make sense of them.
“Next,” the cashier said, prompting me to step forward and put in my order.
The coffee tasted overly sweet and weak when I took my first sip.
Australians seemed to like theirs brutally strong.
I barely slept a wink the first night on the farm.
Half of that was down to Bruce… Pausing in the hallway, I leant against the wall.
Couldn’t think about the huntsman spider right now, nor his wrangler.
So why did the sight of Troy sliding the paper behind the glass bowl fill my mind?
It was the memory of me clutching my breasts that had me smiling finally.
Like the sun that just peeks through the cloudy sky, it was a little ray of light.
Then these words sent the sun into hiding again.
“Alex Miller.” What the hell was my ex doing back at the hospital and who was he talking to? Looking down the hall, I frowned. The guy Alex addressed was tall, broad shouldered.
All too familiar.
“No…” I hissed. “No.”
Alex sized the man up and obviously seemed a bit intimidated by the way he squared his shoulders. His fingers gripped the other man’s and he shook it sharply, then said this.
“I’m Mackenzie’s fiancé.”