It’s not just a muscle.
I truly believed that the heart stored the essence of everything a person possessed. The human body didn’t start with the brain or the legs…no…when we were conceived…the first thing doctors searched for?
The heartbeat.
When you get married…you don’t just ask for your wife’s hand. The first thing you search for? Her heart.
When you’re sick. The doctor doesn’t ask about your heart—he listens to it.
Seems to me like we’ve had it wrong all these years.
If you have a heart—I guarantee—there’s someone out there who wants it. Who’s searching for it. Who dreams about it.
“Wes?” Gabe knocked me in the shoulder. “You okay?”
“Yeah, just thinking about…things,” I lied.
“Well,” he said, sighing. “Pretty sure all thinking will cease the minute that girl walks through that door.”
“Oh yeah?” I smirked. “Why?”
Gabe gave me a knowing grin.
Kiersten walked through the door, her eyes already pouring tears down her cheeks.
And then I looked at the bouquet she was holding.
Red roses. In the shape of a heart.
She was holding my heart.
Chapter Five
He’d given me his heart a long time ago—and now I was giving it back, not because I didn’t want it. But because I wanted to share it. With him. Forever.—Kiersten
Kiersten
When Lisa drove me up to the hospital, my first thought was something had happened to Wes. Funny, how you think you can be totally over something. And then one tiny little thing happens and immediately you’re back to that place. I wondered if PTSD was like that.
You live your life every day, going through the motions, and then BOOM! Something suddenly happens to throw you off kilter and the only thing you want to do is go sit in a corner and rock back and forth.
When she parked and didn’t start crying or saying that we were there because the man I loved was dying—again. I lost it.
Too close to home.
I wanted to leave.
Actually, I wanted to smack Wes and then I wanted to leave. How dare he scare me like that!
“Hey!” Lisa grabbed my hand. “You need to do this.”
“I don’t want to.” I knew I sounded like a whiny child, and Wes had probably gone to a lot of trouble to use the little chapel at the hospital. But I didn’t…I couldn’t. My throat felt thick as I tried to swallow.
I hadn’t had a panic attack in a really long time.
But being back in that hospital, even in the parking garage, was doing some serious damage to my nervous system.
I didn’t want to stay and fight. I wanted to run away. I wanted to run in the opposite direction of the memories of Wes lying in that hospital bed. Of the look on his face when he said goodbye. My breath hitched in my chest as my stomach clenched with fear.