Chapter 66

Chapter 66

Mira’s POV

It started the way it always did. Not dramatically. Not with the kind of warning that gave you enough time to sit down and prepare yourself and call someone with a calm voice and a clear head. Just a whisper at first, a low persistent pressure behind my sternum that I’d learned to recognize the way you recognized the sound of a storm before the sky had fully decided what it was doing.

I was in Zara’s bathroom when it hit properly.

She was asleep down the hall, which was the only mercy available to me in that moment, because what happened next was not something I wanted an audience for.

The pressure built fast, faster than the last time, climbing from manageable to something else entirely in the space of about thirty seconds.

I gripped the edge of the sink and looked at my reflection in the mirror above it, the fluorescent light doing nobody any favors at 2am, and watched my own face go through several expressions I had no control over.

“Okay,” I breathed. “Okay. You’re fine.”

My reflection looked unconvinced.

The pain arrived next, that familiar vicious squeezing sensation that turned the simple mechanical act of breathing into something that required concentration and negotiation and a significant amount of willpower.

I pressed one hand flat against my chest like I could hold it together from the outside, which was medically useless and emotionally necessary.

I slid down the cabinet slowly until I was sitting on Zara’s cold bathroom floor with my back against the vanity, my knees pulled up and my heart doing something inside my chest that felt nothing like what hearts were supposed to do.

Don’t cough, I told myself firmly. Do not cough.

But I coughed once, hard and I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and kept it there breathing through my nose in the slow deliberate pattern the doctor had shown me, in for four counts, hold for four, out for four, the kind of breathing that felt absurd when your chest was actively staging a revolt but worked just enough to take the edge off the panic.

The panic was the dangerous part.

Dr. Osei had explained it to me in the careful measured tone he used when he was trying to be reassuring while delivering information that was the opposite of reassuring. 

Stress accelerates the deterioration, Mira. Anxiety puts additional strain on an already compromised muscle. You need to stay calm.

I had laughed at him that day.

Not rudely. Just the specific laugh that escapes when someone says something so disconnected from your actual life that your body doesn’t know how else to respond.

Stay calm. Sure. While my heart was forgetting how to do its one job, while I was hiding a terminal diagnosis from everyone who loved me, while the man I was in love with was sitting in a house with another woman and not answering my calls. Absolutely. Perfect conditions for calm.

The pain peaked somewhere around the two minute mark.

That was the thing nobody told you about this, that it had a shape. It built and it crested and then it retreated, not fully, never fully, but enough that you could breathe again without it feeling like an argument. Enough that the edges of your vision stopped doing the blurring thing that genuinely terrified me every single time.

I sat on the cold tiles and breathed, waiting for it to pass.

It took four minutes.

I knew because I was staring at the clock on my phone, watching the numbers change with the focused desperation of someone who needed proof that time was still moving normally even when nothing else was.

When it was over I stayed on the floor for a while longer.

Not because I needed to. Just because the floor felt honest in a way that nothing else did at 2am after something like that. Cold and solid and completely indifferent to everything happening above it.

I looked at my phone.

Dr. Osei’s number was in there under a contact name that said Dentist because I’d been paranoid about Dro finding it and asking questions I wasn’t ready to answer while I had lived with him. 

I’d been doing that for months, hiding things in plain sight under boring names, living a whole parallel life in the margins of my actual one.

I didn’t call him.

I knew what he would say. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat, irregular and insistent and impossible to ignore.

The surgery cannot wait, Mira. Every week you delay this the odds shift. You’re not invincible. You’re not being brave, you’re being reckless.

He’d said all of it. Multiple times. In that careful measured voice that got progressively less measured the longer I kept showing up to appointments and nodding and then going home and doing nothing about it.

The problem was that surgery cost money I didn’t have in the quantity required.

The problem was that surgery required telling people things I hadn’t told them.

The problem was Alejandro, the gala, a proposal I’d said no to and a truth I still hadn’t managed to say out loud to the person who most needed to hear it.

The problems were, frankly, numerous.

I pulled myself off the floor, stood at the sink, ran the cold tap and pressed my wet hands against my face, standing there with water dripping off my chin and my reflection looking back at me with an expression I didn’t particularly enjoy.

She looked tired.

Not the regular kind. The deep kind, the kind that lived in your bones and your eyes and the set of your shoulders at two in the morning on a bathroom floor in your best friend’s flat while your heart reminded you repeatedly that it was running out of patience.

“Pull it together,” I whispered to her.

She didn’t look particularly motivated.

I turned off the tap and dried my face and opened the bathroom door quietly, stepping back into the dark hallway. 

Zara’s door was still closed, no light underneath it, the soft sound of her breathing audible in the silence.

I stood there for a second.

Then I went back to the couch, pulled the blanket up and pressed my hand flat against my chest where the ache still hummed quietly, diminished now but present, always present, the constant background noise of a body that was trying to tell me something I already knew.

My phone screen lit up suddenly in the dark.

I grabbed it fast, my heart doing an involuntary stupid thing before my eyes focused on the name.

Ace.

A text, sent at 2am, which meant he was awake too for reasons I hadn’t asked about yet.

Ace: Can’t sleep. You okay?

I stared at it for a moment.

Three dots appeared before I could decide whether to respond.

Ace: You don’t have to answer. Just wanted you to know someone’s up if you need them.

Something in my chest shifted in a way that had nothing to do with my condition.

I typed back slowly.

Me: I’m okay. Go to sleep.

His response came immediately.

Ace: Liar.

Despite everything, despite the bathroom floor and the four minutes and the doctor’s voice in my head and the ache that hadn’t fully left my chest, I felt the corner of my mouth pull upward against my will.

I put the phone face down and closed my eyes.

Just a little longer, I told myself.

Hold on just a little longer.