Page 55 of At the Heart of It (The Can’t Have Hearts Club #4)

It was too late for a lot of things.

He’d found out twenty minutes ago that the brother he’d spent his whole life butting heads with over bubble gum and girls and careers and finances—his only goddamn brother—had suffered a massive heart attack and died.

It wasn’t even a heroic death, which would have pissed Matt off more than anything. Hair transplant surgery? For crying out loud.

Kyle shook his head and stared at his brother’s pale-faced fiancée.

Ex-fiancée , he reminded himself. The current fiancée was in the next room having a screaming match with Matt’s surgeon.

“I didn’t even know he was taking Viagra!” Chloe shrieked from the adjacent room. “And anyway, how was he supposed to know not to take a big dose the night before a hair transplant?”

“Ma’am, I’m very sorry, but the pre-surgical literature explains the risks of nitric oxide and the anesthesia we use for this procedure.

We went over those with him at the consultation.

Your fiancé may have chosen not to inform us he was taking medication for erectile dysfunction, but he was presented with the information when we?—”

Kyle leaned over and pulled the door shut, hoping like hell Meg hadn’t heard the conversation.

He couldn’t tell anything from her expression, except that she looked like she might be on the brink of losing her lunch.

Her fingers twisted tightly in the ribbons attached to a ridiculously cheerful mess of helium balloons as she chewed on her lip like she always used to when she felt uncomfortable.

Why the hell was she here?

Why the hell was he here, for that matter?

It’s not like he and Matt had been close.

They’d fought like ill-tempered badgers more often than not, caught in a weird web of competition and jealousy with a dash of reluctant fondness thrown in for variety.

It was just a fluke that he’d come to see Matt in the hospital today, just in time to learn they’d never spend another Thanksgiving bickering over football and sweet potatoes.

“Dead,” Meg repeated, and Kyle realized it was the first word either of them had spoken in three minutes. She sounded like she was testing it out to see how it sounded.

Not good, apparently. Her eyes filled with tears and he watched her throat working to swallow a lump that probably matched the one lodged in his throat for the last twenty minutes.

“Dead,” Kyle confirmed. “So now’s really not a good time.”

“My God, Kyle—I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I heard it was just a simple procedure and I thought?—”

She stopped there, not vocalizing what she’d thought, but giving Kyle a pretty good idea just the same. Tears spilled down her cheeks in earnest now, and part of him wanted to pull her into his arms, to offer her some small measure of comfort or to claim some for himself.

But this was Meg, for God’s sake.

Meg.

She was still beautiful, even with red-rimmed eyes and her nose running like a faucet.

He should offer her a tissue or show her the door but he just stood there like a moron noticing the way her dark auburn curls tumbled in chaotic ringlets around her shoulders and her pale-blue T-shirt clung and dipped and curved around breasts he’d always done his damnedest not to look at.

Dammit, what kind of jerk was he? Was he seriously ogling his brother’s ex-fiancée while the man himself got wheeled to the hospital morgue by an orderly who looked like Napoleon Dynamite?

It’s not like this is the first time you’ve had inappropriate thoughts about Meg.

Which was true, but now was hardly the time to do it again.

“Look, I don’t know what to say,” he said.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Meg choked out. “If I’d known?—”

A door burst open at the end of the hall, and Kyle swung his gaze away from her and toward the stampede of relatives descending upon them like a pack of bison. Aunt Judy, Uncle Arthur, a cousin whose name escaped him at the moment but he felt pretty sure rhymed with snot. Scott? Lamott?

Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you?

He spotted his mom at the head of the pack with puffy eyes and a crookedly-buttoned blouse. She wore one navy shoe and one black one, and the sight of his sophisticated mother looking so undone made Kyle’s heart ball up like the wad of Kleenex she clenched in one fist.

Meg gave a muffled cry beside him, and Kyle turned to see her gripping the balloon ribbons hard enough to carve deep grooves in her fingers. Her mouth fell open and she took a step back as the mob drew closer.

Kyle looked back at his mother, not sure whether to hug her or get out of her way. He was saved from doing either as his mom’s gaze landed on Meg and she thrust one manicured finger toward her former-future-daughter-in-law.

“You!” she barked, her eyes glittering with fury and tears as she swung her gaze from Meg to Kyle. “What is she doing here?”

Ten minutes later, Meg sat sobbing in the driver’s seat, her hair glued to Kendall’s lip gloss as she tried not to get snot on her best friend’s cashmere sweater.

“Oh, sweetie,” Kendall soothed. “You couldn’t have known. I’m so sorry.”

“I just— dead ,” she repeated, not able to come up with any word more suitable than that.

But that one pretty much summed it up.

“I’ve spent the last two years hating him for sleeping with Annabelle,” she choked out. “Just when I was ready to stop hating him?—”

“I know,” Kendall soothed, petting Meg’s hair. “I know. Two years of hating him and a few days of trying not to hate him is still no match for nearly ten years of loving him.”

Which was true, Meg knew, though it was hard to categorize exactly what she felt now.

Grief? Loss? How could she feel those things for someone she hadn’t seen in two years?

Someone she’d actively despised, then gradually forgotten, or at least tried to forget.

They could have even become friends again, in a perfect world.

“I never got to say I was sorry,” Meg said. “For leaving him at the altar like that. I never apologized.”

“So you’re even,” Kendall said, “for the fact that he cheated on you and didn’t think to tell you about it until the night before the wedding. And the fact that you’ve spent the last two years working your ass off to pay for the wedding that never happened.”

“It was my choice.” Meg drew back from the hug and mopped her nose with a stiff Burger King napkin. “No one else should have been stuck with the debt when I was the one who called off the wedding.”

Kendall shook her head, and Meg could see she was biting back the urge to argue, or to call Matt a cheating, spineless dickhead. Now was hardly the time for that, so Kendall settled for handing her another napkin.

“Between the cheating and the debt, don’t you think that cancels out the runaway-bride thing?” Kendall asked.

“I have no idea. Where’s the manual on the checks and balances of adultery and aborted weddings?”

Kendall gave a small smile and tucked a curl behind Meg’s ear. “I keep it on a bookshelf in my living room. It’s right next to the wine cabinet. Come on, I’ll show you. But first, get out of the car.”

“What?”

“You’re in no shape to drive. Give me the keys.”

Meg looked down at her hand and realized she was holding the keys in a death grip, along with the strings to the damn balloon bouquet. She dropped the keys into Kendall’s palm, then unraveled the ribbons from around her hand.

“Holy cow,” Kendall said, poking the deep rivets furrowed into the flesh of Meg’s fingers. “What were you doing with these?”

“Practicing my skills with a garrote, apparently.” Meg winced as a fresh wave of guilt surged up her throat. Making a wisecrack about strangulation mere minutes after her ex-fiancé’s death had to be up there on the list of things that would get her a one-way ticket to hell.

Meg let go of the ribbons, releasing the balloon bouquet into the backseat before pushing open the driver’s side door.

Her legs trembled as she made her way around the car while Kendall scooted over the gearshift and got into the driver’s seat.

Meg slipped into the passenger seat and buckled her seatbelt, numb to the motions of it all as Kendall cranked over the engine.

“It’ll be okay, honey,” Kendall said as she backed out of the parking spot. “Is there anyone you need to call? Mutual friends or his college roommates or something?”

Meg thought about it, then shook her head. “It’s not really my place, is it? I’m not part of the family.”

Not anymore , she thought, recalling the coldness in Sylvia Midland’s eyes when she’d spotted Meg outside her son’s room.

Even the aunts and uncles she’d met only a handful of times had looked like they wanted to drag her down the hospital hallway by her hair.

She could hardly blame them. The last time she’d seen them, they’d been dressed in suits and summer dresses, watching slack-jawed as she turned and bolted from the church, knocking down pew bows as she ran.

They looked like they hated me , she thought. Then and now . The idea was hardly surprising. Wasn’t that why she’d kept her distance all this time?

On her own side, Meg’s family and friends had few kind words to say about Matt.

When she was still reeling from his confession and desperate to explain why she’d fled her own wedding, she’d told them about Matt’s affair.

It was the sort of thing she’d normally keep private, not wanting to air their dirty laundry or add fuel to her own fear she’d done something to drive him to cheat in the first place.

But she’d told her whole family in a moment of weakness, and the story spread as quickly as their new disdain for Matt.

So they’d drawn the battle lines cleanly between her family and his, unfriending each other’s colleagues and cousins on social media and cutting each other’s faces out of family pictures.

The thought gave her a momentary pang of sadness. Part of her had missed the Midland family Christmas cards and his mother’s coq au vin and the quilt rack she’d felt obligated to return.

But she’d never told anyone what she’d missed the most about being cut off from the Midland family.

Kyle’s face floated through her brain and she pulled in a shuddery breath. He’d looked so stricken standing outside his brother’s hospital room. She closed her eyes, flushing a fresh wave of tears down her cheeks. She opened them again to let the emotion flow.

Kendall reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’ll take a shortcut. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Thank you,” Meg whispered.

A purple and black polka-dotted balloon bopped her on the side of the head, and Meg shoved it away, crowding it into the backseat with the rest. The motion pushed more balloons forward, creating a burst of brightly colored Mylar shapes bumbling their way toward the front of the car.

“Stop!” Meg shouted.

“It’s okay,” Kendall said, ignoring a shark-shaped balloon that bumped her head as she turned down the side street leading away from the hospital. “It’s not bothering me.”

“No, stop the car.” She felt frantic now, desperate to get rid of the cheery orbs pushing and bobbing and reminding her that nothing would ever be the same again. She grabbed the ribbons as Kendall slowed the car.

“What are you doing, Meg? You can’t just let them go. They’re hazardous to wildlife.”

“I know,” she said, pushing open the car door before Kendall brought the car to a full stop in the bike lane. “I just need to get rid of them.”

She staggered onto the sidewalk with her fistful of balloons, thinking this was how people went crazy. One minute you’re making friendly overtures to your ex and the next minute you’re stumbling teary-eyed down the road with a balloon shaped like a banana beating you in the back of the head.

Meg looked around while Kendall sat silent in the driver’s seat, waiting. She couldn’t pop them. All that racket seemed inappropriate as they idled here less than a mile from where Matt took his last breath.

Off to the side, a metal bench sat waiting for bus passengers. Meg hurried over, kneeling on the asphalt to cinch the ribbons around one of the legs. Her fingers felt numb and useless, but she managed to tie the knot and stand up again, her knees still wobbly.

There. She surveyed her work, then nodded. Someone else would find them and claim them. Someone else would take them to a sick relative who’d smile and laugh and reach up to touch the plump, colorful shapes.

She turned back to the car and moved around to the passenger side, winded and spent as she dropped into the seat again.

“Feel better now?” Kendall asked.

“A little.”

“Probably better than that dead pigeon you almost stepped on.”

Meg turned in her seat to look behind them as Kendall pulled away from the curb. Get well soon! the balloon commanded the corpse of a gray and green bird.

Meg closed her eyes and slid down in her seat, wondering if pigeons mated for life the way doves did, wondering if she had any right at all to feel this undone.

***

Want to keep reading? Grab Now That It’s You !

As promised, I wanted to give you a peek at my Ponderosa Resort rom-com series.

It’s a reader favorite centered around adult siblings working to turn their late-father’s vanity ranch into a luxury resort (all while getting to know each other because they had different mothers.

Er, Dad got around). Keep reading for a peek at Chef Sugarlips . . .