Chapter 25 TESSA
Tessa
The first thing I do is reach for him.
I do it before I open my eyes, smiling, because he’s been beating me out of bed all week. Coffee before sunrise. The gym if I sleep through my alarm. Standing at the windows with that ridiculous expensive mug in one hand, looking out at the ocean like he owns that too.
My fingers find nothing but cool cotton.
“Ronan?”
No answer.
The bathroom door is open. No shower running. I push myself upright, rub the sleep out of my eyes, and glance at the clock. Six-twelve.
He’s probably downstairs. He’s been impossible lately, stronger every day, restless with all the energy he suddenly has and no idea what to do with it.
I smile to myself, pull on one of his T-shirts, and grab my phone off the nightstand.
I start down the stairs, already planning how I’ll tease him for disappearing without kissing me goodbye.
Halfway down, I stop.
His coffee mug is sitting on the island. Steam still curling off the top.
He was here a minute ago. And he isn’t answering me.
“Ronan?” Louder this time.
The terrace is empty. I turn toward his study, and that’s when I hear it.
A single rough breath. The sound of someone trying to pull air into lungs that won’t cooperate.
I run.
The study door is open and he’s on the floor.
He’s half against the desk like he tried to get to it or tried to get up from it, one hand pressed flat to the center of his chest. His face is the color of wet cement, and he’s breathing in short shallow pulls that aren’t moving nearly enough air.
Everything in me that is a woman in love with this man goes completely silent.
The nurse steps forward and takes the room.
I’m on my knees in front of him, my hand going to his face. “Ronan. Look at me. Look at me.”
His eyes find mine. They’re wrong. Glassy, frightened, trying so hard to be calm for me even now. “My chest,” he gets out. There’s barely any voice behind it.
“I know. I’ve got you.” My hands are already working, two fingers at his throat, and his pulse is going too fast and too thin under them, a hundred and thirty at least, and his skin is cold and damp and I press the back of my hand to it and I already know.
“Ronan, stay looking at me. Can you take a full breath for me?”
He tries. It catches halfway, and his face spasms, and his hand presses harder against his chest, and that’s the whole answer.
The calf. The drive.
No.
God, no.
I have run this call a hundred times, in a hundred bays, on a hundred strangers.
I have never once run it on the man I love.
And here is the cruelest thing my training gives me: I know exactly what’s happening inside his chest, and I know there isn’t one thing in this house that can stop it.
No drug in my bag. No skill in my hands.
A clot like this needs a hospital, needs machines and medicine I don’t have, and every second I’m on this floor is a second he doesn’t have them.
Right now, all my expertise is good for is knowing exactly how much trouble he’s in.
I have my phone. I don’t remember getting it. I’m dialing with one hand and holding his jaw with the other, and my voice, when it comes, is dead steady, the voice I use for the worst nights, the one that doesn’t belong to the person shaking inside my own body.
“I need an ambulance.” I give the address, the estate, the gate code.
“Thirty-two-year-old male. Twelve weeks post-op femur repair, off his blood thinners. Sudden chest pain, severe shortness of breath, heart rate’s about one-thirty and thready.
I can’t get a pressure on him. Suspected massive pulmonary embolism.
I’m a trauma nurse. I need you here now, and I need them ready for a possible arrest.”
The voice on the other end says words. I hear none of them. Ronan is watching me say all of that with an expression I will never forget as long as I live, because he understood every word, and I watched him understand it.
“Tessa.” My name is almost nothing now, just shape and breath.
I lean close, my forehead nearly to his. “Save your breath. Just look at me.”
“Thought—” He has to stop, drag in what little air he can, force the rest out on the tail of it. “It was the leg press.” That dry humor, even now, even in pieces.
The question tears out of me before I can stop it, my voice cracking on it. “Why didn’t you tell me? You knew. In the car, you knew.”
Then I hear what I’m asking him to spend. “Don’t. Don’t answer that.”
His eyes hold mine. Even now, even gray on the floor, he answers me anyway, because he has never lied to me, and he isn’t going to start with his life running out.
“Because.” He stops. Fights for the air to finish it. “You’d have made me... go back.”
And I can’t be angry. That’s the terrible thing.
I kneel there with his pulse coming apart under my fingers and I understand him completely, because he didn’t hide it from me to keep a secret.
He hid it because he knew I’d choose his life over the freedom he’d only just got back, and he wanted, so badly, to just be a well man in his own house a little longer.
“You idiot,” I whisper, and it’s the most loving thing I’ve ever said to anyone. “You beautiful idiot. You’re going to be the patient again. And I’m going to be insufferable about it. Stay with me.”
My fingers stay on his pulse the entire time, counting.
I need to know the second it’s gone. I keep him still.
I keep him upright against the desk where he can breathe.
I keep my hand over the scar on his ribs and I keep my voice level and I do not let one single thing I am feeling reach my hands, because my hands are the only useful thing in this room.
I call Sadie from the floor while I count his pulse.
She answers on the second ring, thick with sleep. “Tess? It’s six in the—”
“Sadie, it’s Ronan.” My voice cracks on his name, and I drag it back level. “Chest pain, dyspnea, tachy, I think it’s a PE, I think it’s a big one. Ambulance is coming.”
Two seconds of absolute silence. Then Sadie Sinclair, ER physician, is fully awake and moving, and I can hear her moving.
“I’m going straight to the hospital. I’ll be there when they bring him in.
” The slam of a door somewhere behind her.
“Tessa. You’re doing everything right. Do not stop doing it.
I’ve got him the second he’s through those doors. I’m coming.”
For the right reasons. She’d said that in a driveway a lifetime ago, and I hadn’t known then I’d ever need it.
And then there’s nothing left to do.
I have never in my life had nothing left to do.
My fingers stay at his throat and I count and I listen to him work for every breath, and I understand, for the first time, what I have been asking families to do in hallways for four years.
There is no skill in it. There is only the waiting, and the terrible arithmetic of how long an ambulance takes.
The sirens come up the road while I’m still on the floor with him.
I hear the gate, the gravel, doors. And then the study fills with people and equipment and a language I speak fluently, and I’m giving the handoff before they’ve got him on the monitor, everything I know, everything I did, and they’re good, and they move.
They get the oxygen on him. They get lines in. The monitor starts screaming numbers I don’t like and they don’t like either, and they are fast, they are so fast, and one of them looks at the other the same look I have given a dozen partners. It means move.
They lift him. His hand comes off his chest and reaches, and I take it, and I go with the stretcher out through the house he built to keep the world out, and his fingers hold mine the whole way to the rig, weaker than his hands have ever been, and I climb in after him, because nobody on this earth was going to stop me.
“Hey.” I’m up by his head, out of their way, still holding on, and I make myself smile at him. “You’re going to be fine.”
His eyes start to drift. “Eyes open. You are so bad at doing what you’re told, don’t start being good at it now.”
His eyes stay on my face. The doors close.
At the ER where I’ve worked for four years, they rush him down a hall I could walk blind. I run alongside the stretcher, answering questions from people I know by name. Nobody asks why I haven’t worked a shift since June. I hold his hand until the exact place where the doors say I can’t.
They take him through.
His hand slides out of mine because I’m not allowed to follow, and the doors swing shut.
I have wheeled a thousand strangers through those doors while their people stood exactly where I am standing now. Today I am one of the people. Today I am on the wrong side.
My legs give out.
And then, only then, with my hands finally empty and no one left to be steady for, I put them over my face and I fall apart.