Read Online Heart Conditions (The Breakup Doctor Series Book 3) by Phoebe Fox - Free Book Online

beside me, to wrap me in his arms, I didn’t even try to stop him. I clung on to him like a piece of floating flotsam after a shipwreck.
    For the first time in two years I felt at peace.

      
    It was dark by the time I drove back home, Jake curled into an impossibly tight ball on my passenger seat, his head wedged at an unnatural angle up the passenger door and his paws poking straight out almost to the dash.
    Michael and I had talked for hours, sitting side by side on a rickety swing set rusted at the joints that groaned out a protest as we swayed gently back and forth, overlooking the placid gulf at low tide. We stayed away from the immediate aftermath of our broken engagement—it was still too tender a wound—but we caught each other up on the last two years of our lives, words pouring out of us. Making our peace together felt as though a part of me that had shriveled up was regenerating, tender spring leaves shooting from a withered brown branch. It was healing and comforting and soothing—but I didn’t know what it all meant.
    I knew who would help me figure it out, though.
    I was dialing Sasha before I even waved goodbye to Michael as I pulled out of my parking space, but the call went to voicemail—just as it had when I’d called her on the way here. Did she have a late interview today? I couldn’t remember. But it bothered me that I still hadn’t spoken to her since family dinner last night.
    “Sasha…call me. I need to talk to you,” I said to her recording.
    When I pulled into my garage I had to coax Jake inside the house—he seemed perfectly content to sleep where he was all night if only I’d agree to stay there with him, worn out from a taxing evening of trotting back and forth as we’d sat on the swing, trying to keep his head beneath our hands. When he saw me get out and open his door, though, he pulled himself wearily up and lumbered out his side of the car. I tried Sasha again, rolling into voicemail. “Sash, where are you? Please call me as soon as you get this.”
    I fed Jake and myself, and as we both ate—him from his bowl beside the sliding door to the patio, me at the kitchen island beside him—my phone finally rang, and I lunged for it, hungry to talk things over with my best friend.
    “Hi, Brook,” came the familiar voice, and my heart thumped involuntarily in my chest.
    “Ben,” I said, and then promptly choked on the food I hadn’t bothered to swallow.
    After a hacking fit that lasted at least close to thirty embarrassing seconds, during which my watering eyes didn’t allow me to find the “mute” button on my phone, I brought it back to my ear from where I’d tried to muffle it under my armpit. “Hey…how’s New York?” I said, as though there’d been no interruption.
    “Are you okay?”
    “Oh, fine,” I replied breezily. “Just a…a frog.” Ben was calling me on his romantic getaway with Perfect Pamela? Things couldn’t be all that romantic if he was thinking of me. “It’s really good to hear from you,” I said.
    “I just wanted to make sure everything’s going okay with Jake. He being a good boy?”
    “Oh…Yes, of course—wonderful. I love having him ba—having him here,” I corrected myself. “Are you guys having just the best time ever ?”
    “Well, I guess,” Ben said after a moment, seemingly taken aback at my overcompensation. “It’s not really all fun and games, of course.”
    “It’s not?”
    “Well, she’s been prepping for the interview, which is tomorrow, so we’ve pretty much stayed close to the hotel. But hopefully we’ll get out and see some of the sights after that.”
    “The…the interview?” Was Pamela up for a job in New York? Was she moving away?
    As quickly as I seized on that thought, a shard of ice slid into my chest. Was Ben planning to move with her?
    “Well, yeah,” he said. “That’s why we came. For Doctors Without Borders?”
    I didn’t know which was worse—the idea that Ben might have been moving