The Heart That Wasn’t Mine, the Life I Never Asked For Chapter 07

The Heart That Wasn’t Mine, the Life I Never Asked For Chapter 07

The impact was loud enough to hear from the top of the ridge.

Ethan went still. He turned around slowly. His face was empty.

“What the hell did you just say?”

“No brake pads?”

“What do you mean there are no brake pads?!”

The shout tore out of him. The expression that followed was something darker than anger.

The people around him went pale and silent.

Jasmine stepped forward and touched his arm.

“Mr. Shaw. It’s all right. It was an accident, just like the Lakeshore Pileup was an accident.”

“And you hated Savannah anyway. If she’s dead, we can finally get Vivienne’s heart back—”

Ethan cut her off.

His eyes had gone red at the edges.

“Do you hear yourself?”

“Savannah dead?”

“She can’t be dead.”

The words came out rough, torn from somewhere he hadn’t meant to show.

Then his voice dropped to something cold and final.

“Jasmine. Don’t forget your place.”

“That proposal on the yacht was staged. Don’t push it.”

He picked up my phone from the ground and pressed it to his ear.

The doctor’s voice was still coming through, frightened and rapid-fire.

“Ms. Cole, can you hear me?”

“Is the mechanical heart malfunctioning?”

“Ms. Cole, should I call an ambulance?”

Ethan’s hand tightened around the phone.

Something flickered across his face, confusion, something cracking open.

“What did you say?”

“What mechanical heart?”

“She has Vivienne’s heart. She’s always had Vivienne’s heart—”

The doctor paused. Then, carefully:

“Are you Ms. Cole’s boyfriend?”

“She had a heart extraction three days ago. She took the heart with her today, said she was returning it to someone.”

“If you care about her at all, please take care of her.”

“A mechanical heart only buys her one year.”

The doctor kept talking.

Ethan’s legs went.

He caught himself, scrambled upright, grabbed the cooler with Vivienne’s heart inside, and ran for his car.

“Savannah, you cannot die.”

“I will not allow it.”

The words came out as something between an order and a prayer, low and repeated, the whole drive down.

He floored it.

When he reached the road, he stopped cold.

The intersection was gridlocked. Multiple vehicles, broken glass, twisted metal.

It looked exactly like the Lakeshore Pileup.

“Savannah!”

He was out of the car and running before the engine stopped.

His mind flashed back to the airport, years ago. The call he’d gotten while connecting through international arrivals.

The doctor, nervous and eager to please, telling him: they’d taken the heart from another girl who’d been in the crash with Vivienne. The donor was alive but critical. Vivienne was stable.

Ethan hadn’t felt relief.

He’d felt dread.

Because hours before the crash, Vivienne had called him laughing, telling him she was out shopping with me.

He’d gone cold all over. Ran through the terminal. Arrived at the hospital convinced he was going to identify my body.

Instead, the doctors had made a mistake with the ID. I was alive.

For one unguarded second, something had moved through him that he couldn’t name.

That second destroyed him.

He’d spent three days punishing himself for it, no food, no sleep, nothing but work, until he collapsed and woke up in a hospital room.

And there I was. Crying and blaming myself in the bed next to his.

He’d taken the love he couldn’t afford to feel and twisted it into something he could use.

Hate.

Three years inside that hatred.

And now, running toward the wreckage, Ethan Shaw finally understood what he’d done.

“Savannah. I was wrong.”

He shoved through the crowd and saw the mountain bike, destroyed, completely unrecognizable.

His vision went white.