Page 36 of Manhattan Heart

I watch until they go through two double doors at the very end of the white hallway and I can no longer see him.

I don’t cry.

I’m kind of numb and anxious, with my breath caught in my throat.

I roll my wedding rings around and around my finger.

I have Gray’s too on my chain because they made him take it off.

That feels like bad luck.

Like he doesn’t have a piece of me with him now to hold onto if…

Please let him be okay.

Please let him be okay.

It’s strange standing there, with my whole body frozen while an entire hospital of people go on around me. I notice the people, but I don’t really see them.

My whole self is somewhere else.

With Grayson.

Six hours.

We can do this.

We’re the unbreakable Ellison’s.

We can do this.

C H A P T E R 11

India

For someone whose life was once bombarded and drowned in anxiety, being in a hospital, albeit a private one that looks like a luxury spa-hotel, is about the worst thing that can happen for any chance of keeping me calm.

I’m in fucking hell.

The smells still smell like a regular hospital where people die every minute of the day. That antiseptic bleach scent that clings to the hairs in your nostrils mixed with the smell of bad coffee.

This isn’t about me.This isn’t about me.

I can’t climb on my woe boat and drift out to sea or I’ll be useless for my husband and though I’m using the breathing exercises to stay peaceful that my therapist taught me, it will be so easy to give in to the panic and fall into a full-scale anxiety attack.

Scared isn’t even the word for it.

So incredibly terrified, more than I’ve ever been before, because I’m in the in between of not knowing what is happening with Gray.

The doctor talked us through the procedure so closely and kindly, probably because Gray pre-warned her of his basket-case wife who needs to know how long the surgery will take and what happens if they are a minute late bringing Gray out.

The clock on the far wall appears to have stopped or is going the wrong way round, but it doesn’t stop me staring at it, willing it to go faster.

Six hours, they said and it’s already been two long hours. If all goes accordingly to the doctors plan, then Gray should be brought to recovery in hopefully four hours or less.

The waiting room is decorated in soft white, with low coffee tables piled with current fashion magazines and beautiful art prints on the walls and vases of colorful flowers. Outside the banks of windows there’s Central Park, but I take none of it in.

I’m statue still, my heart is somewhere on an operating table with Grayson.

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