Prologue

Misti

All my life, there were so many things I couldn’t do. So many things I never even dreamed of doing, because I was always told I never could. So many things I didn’t know I wanted, needed, desired. Couldn’t live without.

Things he showed me. Things only he could give me.

Blaze.

As fiery as his name suggests, as gentle as a soft summer breeze. Mine forever.

Forever lasted less than a year.

I used to be the one everyone thought would die young.

I never knew how that felt for others. How excruciatingly painful it was for those who loved me.

Until now.

The line of his heartbeat is erratic, full of peaks not high enough and valleys too low. It’s how my heart line used to look on the monitors I spent half my life attached to before they finally mended my heart. Mended, not fixed. Blaze did that.

But now, it is his heartbeat that does not rise and fall as it should.

I got my life back.

I got my life for the first time since I was born.

But that erratic, failing line on the monitor might as well be mine.

Once it goes flat, it will take me with it.

Together forever.

I was not born to live long.

I was not born to love long.

But I did.

I loved him with all of my faulty heart.

I never imagined I’d survive him.

And I won’t.


Chapter 1

Misti

Ten Months Ago

I’ve spent so much time in hospital rooms and doctor’s offices growing up they’re like a second home to me. My comfort zone, you could say. I don’t know who I am if not a patient. If not a girl with so many congenital heart problems, she should already be dead for years.

Sunlight, soft and diffuse, is streaming in through the pull-up blinds covering the large windows of this ground-level office at the hospital in which I have spent almost half of my short life. The blinds are opaque, but still translucent enough so I can see the cars in the parking lot just outside, the afternoon sun glaring off their windshields and metallic paint. It’s sweltering hot out there, but nice and cool in here, with a gentle breeze from the AC unit mounted over the window stirring the hair on my bare arms.

My heart isn’t fluttering the way it always has, nor skipping beats or dropping out of rhythm. Now my heart rate is firm and steady and the breaths I take seem to be bringing oxygen into all the parts of my body where it’s needed.

It’s been that way for weeks now and keeps getting better.

But it doesn’t erase the years and years of never being able to trust my heart to work. Not even from one beat to the next. It doesn’t erase the fear that it will stop any moment now. It’s this new steady heartbeat I don’t trust. That’s what scares me now.

“You look worried,” Doctor Jay says. “Is something wrong?”

He’s an attractive man in his early fifties, a wave of wheat blond hair lazily draped over his forehead, twinkling blue eyes, and permanent smile wrinkles around his eyes.

I smile at him, hoping it’ll fool him into not seeing the fear. This man came up with the revolutionary surgical technique that saved my life and gave me a future.

“I’m still getting used to my new heartbeat,” I say.

He chuckles. “New heartbeat? That’s a great way of putting it.”

“It’s the best way I can describe it,” I say. “I didn’t have much of a heartbeat before. But I do now and that means I can finally start living. I’m going partying in Vegas tonight for the first time in my life, and I lived right outside it the entire time.”

His eyes glaze over to the point where I’m expecting to see tears well up in them.

“Just don’t overdo it, Misti,” he says, and leaves the rest unsaid.

I may be cured in terms of how sick I was before the operation he performed on my aortic and mitral valves. But in terms of having a healthy heart… well, that will never truly happen for me. I’ve lived with the knowledge my entire life and have long since accepted it.

This level of healthy is already almost too much for me.

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