Broken Beautiful Hearts(99)

“Thanks.” It’s nice to be reminded. I lean my head against his arm.

“What happened after you confronted him?”

“At first, he said the drugs weren’t his. Then he realized that I wasn’t buying it and admitted it. He wasn’t going to stop, so I broke up with him. That’s when he got angry. It was like watching Bruce Banner turn into the Incredible Hulk. Or maybe the Hulk had been there all along and I just didn’t see it. He started yelling at me and pushing me.”

Owen puts his arm around me and pulls me close.

“There were steps behind me and he knew it.” My voice cracks. “He pushed me again and I fell back.”

Owen moves in front of me and I wrap my arms around his neck.

“I was so scared.” It’s the first time I’ve said those words and the moment I say them tears roll down my face.

“Nobody will ever hurt you that way again.” Owen hugs me tighter. “I’m so sorry. I wish I had been there. I’d never let anyone hurt you.”

When I finally stop crying, Owen dries my face with the bottom of his T-shirt. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

Owen’s expression … there’s something wrong.

“What is it?” I touch his face and he tries to turn away. His eyes are glassy, like he’s about to cry. “Owen? Look at me. Are you okay?”

He shakes his head. “He hurt you and I let him get away with it.”

“That’s not true.”

Owen wipes his face on his sleeve. “He was talking so much shit about you in the cage. About how you were so in love with him and you couldn’t handle it when he broke up with you.”

“When he broke up with me? He said that?”

Owen takes a deep breath. “I knew he was lying, but I kept thinking about how scared you looked when you saw him, and that crack he made about you telling people that he pushed you. I should’ve beaten the shit out of him.”

He coughs and suddenly all I can think about is the way he looked in the locker room when he couldn’t breathe. I cling to him until his breathing evens out again.

I lay my palm on the middle of his chest. “What’s wrong with your heart, Owen?”

He puts his hand on top of mine. “I have a genetic defect that causes arrhythmias—abnormal heart rhythms. It’s called Brugada syndrome.”

“I’ve never heard of it.” Not that I’m up to speed on cardiology.

“It’s rare. Before the doctors diagnosed me I had no clue what it was, either. They almost didn’t figure it out at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“I passed out during wrestling practice. My coach thought I was dehydrated or something. But it happened on school grounds so they sent me to the hospital. The doctors checked me out and ran a bunch of tests. They even did an EKG and it was normal. The cardiologist asked my mom all these questions about our family history. One of them was if anyone in our family had died young, under strange circumstances. We didn’t know it then, but that’s a red flag for Brugada syndrome.

“My mom told him about my older cousin, who died a few years earlier, at eighteen. He was a swimmer, headed for the Olympics. But he drowned in his pool. They did an autopsy and there was no sign of a head injury, so he didn’t hit his head and there were no signs of an aneurysm or a stroke. After my cardiologist heard about my cousin, he did another EKG. I guess they have to look at a specific spot where the lungs and the ventricle meet to know if a person has Brugada syndrome. And I have it.”

I’m terrified to ask the next question. “So you could have a heart attack?”

He squeezes my hand. “Worse. I won’t go into cardiac arrest at all. My heart will literally stop beating. Unless someone like a doctor or a paramedic happens to be around with a defibrillator and they get my heart restarted—I’ll die.”

It physically hurts to hear him say it.

Then there’s the part he isn’t saying.

I’ve watched enough medical dramas on TV to know that a defibrillator isn’t a sure thing. In those scenes, a doctor is usually performing chest compressions on a heart attack victim when the nurses show up with a crash cart. When the machine is charged, the doctor shocks the patient with the paddles. Then she waits.

Sometimes the patient pulls through and their heartbeat zigzags across the monitor. Other times, the patient continues to flatline.

“Are there warning signs? So you can get to a hospital in time?”

“Not always.” Owen takes my hand off his chest and traces shapes on my palm—a circle, a star, and finally a heart. “And the symptoms are common stuff like shortness of breath and fatigue, so it’s easy to miss them.”

A tear escapes and runs down my cheek.

Owen reaches out and brushes it away with his thumb. “This is the reason I didn’t tell you—or anyone else. My heart could stop five minutes from now or five years from now. There’s no way to predict it.”

I hear what he’s saying, but it doesn’t make sense. Owen is young and healthy. And his heart is just going to stop one day, with no warning?

“But the doctors can fix it, right?” I hear my dad’s voice in the back of my head, and I repeat the words he’d said so many times: “Everything can be fixed.”