A Change of Heart (3 page)

Instead of opening her mouth and parroting the same drivel she'd been laying on him, she unzipped her sweatshirt. It instantly billowed around her, bloating her tiny form. In the floodlit night her cheeks flamed with an almost bruise-like flush.

She looked down at the shirt she was wearing under the sweatshirt and lifted her fingers to the buttons. For one terribly potent second, her hands trembled in place before she took a breath and started unbuttoning her shirt.

What the hell? She'd just tried the “I see dead people” routine on him and now she was going for seduction?

Her fingers clutched the edges of the shirt and started peeling them apart. He was about to turn away. He'd seen enough. But her hands stopped after opening the shirt only a sliver, exposing no more than a mere inch of her sternum.

His eyes locked on that narrow, exposed strip of skin.

She held the fabric in place as the wind tried to pry it apart. The lamp behind him hit her like a spotlight. She lifted her chin, elongating her neck.

His eyes traced the exposed strip of flesh and his dead heart slammed to life in his chest.

Etched into the pale bronze skin was a clean, straight, pink gash starting at the base of her throat and slashing her chest in half right down the center.

“I have your wife's heart,” she said so quietly that if the words had been any different he would never have heard them.

A surgical scar.

Holy mother of God.

Jen's heart.

She had his Jen's heart.

He lifted his hand and reached for her. He didn't know why he did it. But Jen's heart was right here, her DNA, her tissue,
her
. Alive and beating.

The girl sucked in a breath and stepped back, moving away from his outstretched hand as though it were a live wire. She pulled her shirt back together and went to work on her buttons. The scar disappeared behind black cotton and trembling fingers.

“I'm sorry.” He had no idea why he was apologizing, but she had looked so terrified when he tried to touch her, it just came out.

“I'm sorry,” she said at the exact same time, and that accidental crash of words snapped her out of wherever she had gone.

For a few moments, neither one of them moved or spoke.

What could he say to her?

Give it back? Give back that thing beating in your chest. It isn't yours.

“I'm so sorry,” she said again. The sympathy in her voice struck a match to the fuse hanging from him. Another blast of rage exploded inside him.

“How do I even know you're telling the truth?”

“I am. My name is Jess Koirala. You can look it up. I was on the national donor registry for five years before I got her heart . . . Jen's heart. It's part of the Government of India medical records.”

“No. I mean heart surgery is a physical procedure. It can't—” He had no idea what kind of madness this was, but God, he wanted what she was saying to be true. He wanted it so badly, his entire being vibrated with the effort to break free from a lifetime of medical knowledge. He'd seen it a million times with patients' families. They'd take hope anywhere they found it. They'd dig up a mountain with their bare hands if hope sat at the center of it.

“I'm a physician. This doesn't happen,” he said more to himself than to her. A flat line was a flat line. A period. Done. You could scream and pray and pump someone's chest until their ribs splintered beneath your hands. But that door, once slammed shut, was closed forever.

She pressed an unsteady hand to her chest, over the pink slash she'd just flashed at him and then hidden away. “How would I know all the things I know? She tells me things. Intimate things. You went to Scotland for your honeymoon. You were together for four months in Malawi after your wedding and then she left the MSF for a chance to work in Dharavi in Mumbai.”

“Anyone could find that out. Anyone could look that up or ask someone we know.”

“But how would I know how upset you were about her taking it.”

“I was not—”

“Yes, you were. She knew you were, even though you didn't say anything.”

He turned away from her, needing to move. Jen was one of the most private people he knew. These weren't things she would share with anyone casually.

* * *

Nikhil walked to the railing and stared out at the ocean. His body remained upright but he looked like she had slid a knife between his ribs.

She knew she had him.

With cruelty she wished she didn't possess, she twisted the knife. “Jen knew you wanted her to wait until you had worked through your posting in Lilongwe. She wished it hadn't happened when you two were fighting about the baby.”

He made a pained sound.

Maybe she shouldn't have brought up the baby. But she was desperate. She needed him insensate with pain, unable to think. “Yes. I know about the baby too. The only reason she left when you were angry was because she knew you would come around. She was that confident of your love. And you did come around. You understood.”

Something wet hit her face. It wasn't raining, and they were too high up on the ship for surf sprays. But the wind was high enough to carry teardrops. She couldn't think about his tears right now.

“Did you know her in Mumbai?” He spoke without turning around. “You could only know these things if she told them to you.”

“She did.”

He spun around. “Stop saying that. Stop fucking saying that. Even if you do have her heart. She's dead. Her heart is just a physical organ. There's no way—”

“You think I don't know that? I thought I was going crazy. For months I haven't been able to stop it. But she won't go away. Why would I come all the way here from Mumbai? Why would I make this up?”

He shook his head. “I don't know. But I'm sure you're going to tell me. You want something from me. What is it?”

“You're right. I want you to do what Jen wanted.”

“And what would that be?”

“She was—”

“Actually, forget I asked. I can't believe how stupid—No. I'm not getting sucked into this. Just leave me alone.”

He turned around and started walking away.

“You have to believe me, Nikhil. Please.” She chased past him and pushed her body between him and the elevator lobby, blocking his path.

He met her eyes with absolute, undiluted loathing. “No. I don't have to believe you. Because what you are saying is nuts.”

“I know it is. But sometimes you just have to have faith. Sometimes you have to leap first to see if your parachute will open.” It was beyond cruel to throw that at him.

Those were the words he'd used to convince Jen to marry him.

All the color drained from his face, one feature at a time, turning his skin sallow under the lights. “How do you—?” He leaned into the elevator button. “Whatever you're up to, it's . . . How do you even know that?”

“I told you. Jen told m—”

“Stop it.” He covered his eyes with his hand and it was a relief to not have to look at them. “Please.”

But she had no mercy to give him. “No one else can do this. Jen was working on something. And it's unfinished. If you don't help, all the work she did is useless.” She took a breath and fought to steady her voice. “Nikhil, Jen needs you.”

The elevator arrived with a ding, and he limped in. “I think you have that backward.” It was the last thing he said before the elevator doors squeezed him from sight, still unconvinced, leaving her with empty hands. All the weapons in her arsenal used up.

4

 

—Dr. Jen Joshi

 

 

I
t had been a while since Nikhil had felt smart. But even his sustained and deliberate disconnection from his lifelong nerd status couldn't excuse the asinine direction of his thoughts. “What if she's telling the truth?” he kept thinking.

After starting the day with that, there was only one way the rest of the day could go: down the crapper. Right where he'd thrown up his Jack every night for two years along with a slow supply of his insides.

Evidently, he had also thrown away ten years of medical education and every iota of common sense.

Jess Koirala was either a really good actress or she was one of those metaphysical types who actually believed the crap she was handing out.

But what if it wasn't crap?

And there it was again. He rubbed the stubbly back of his head as though that could erase the stupidity.

No. It
was
crap. But it was impressively well-executed crap. Whatever she was planning, she had pulled it off brilliantly—catching him at the lowest point of his day, or highest, if you were measuring blood alcohol levels. All the disappearing around corners, the trembling fingers, the dark clothes. That hair.

Then there was the scar. He couldn't get that slash of raised skin out of his head. Even though he hadn't touched it, he could feel its pliant thickness against his fingers like a memory he hadn't created yet.

He had to stop this. He might suck at what he did now, but he had been a damn good physician in his past life. Organ transplants transferred no feelings, no memories, no personality traits from donor to recipient. It was just a spare part being installed in a different machine. That's all.

That is all.

So Miss Koirala was up to something.

It was time to find out what it was, and once he did he was going to make her regret ever defiling Jen's memory.

Without giving himself time to think, he yanked open a dresser drawer. Right behind his wallet, tucked at the very back of the drawer, was a plain white business card.

He checked the alarm clock on his nightstand. It was six a.m. Which meant it was still late afternoon in Mumbai.
DCP Rahul Savant,
the card said next to a hand-scrawled number.

Rahul Savant. The cop's name brought on a vivid rush of memories. Jen's body being lifted into the ambulance. The endless lineups of criminals. Identifying the bastards, but getting absolutely no satisfaction from it, only more anger and the crazed desire to kill them with his bare hands.

The questions that had gone on even after he had put the bastards in prison.

And then that day when DCP Savant had upended his already upended world.

He would never forget the look on the cop's face when he had told Nikhil that his wife had lied to him. Kept such a huge secret from him. Put herself in danger. Put their baby in danger. Left him out. Left him.

Jen's murder wasn't a random crime,
the bastard had said, looking at Nikhil as though he understood what Nikhil was feeling.
Someone was using Jen's donor registry database to steal organs. She had all the evidence we need to put these bastards away. We need your help finding it. You owe her that.

Those words had shut everything down, destroyed everything, his anger an inferno so consuming it had burned down who he had been and left behind this charred, smoking mess that he didn't know what to do with.

The bastard had put Jen in danger. He had cost Jen her life because he hadn't done his job and protected her, and he had the gall to tell Nikhil what he owed his wife. Nikhil had told him and his smarmy politician boss to go to hell.

The politician had thought Nikhil was kidding. The smile that had split his face had reminded Nikhil of a wound that needed suturing. But Nikhil had meant it. It had felt like the only way anything would ever make sense again. He'd been right because nothing had made sense since then.

Before he could slide the business card back in the drawer, he dialed.

The cop answered on the first ring. “DCP Savant.”

Nikhil almost hung up.

“Hello? Who's speaking?”

The bastard didn't have the right to sound this calm. “This is Nikhil Joshi. Calling from America.” Technically, they were in Jamaica right now, but he didn't think the cop would care.

“Dr. Joshi?” The cop's voice went from distracted to focused so fast Nikhil might have found it funny, if it hadn't kicked off that sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “How are you, Doctor
saab?
” The relief in his voice was so acute it was almost as if he'd spent the past two years sitting by the phone, waiting for Nikhil to call.

Two years. It had been two years since Nikhil had told him to go to hell, left India, and stopped answering his incessant phone calls, and he sure as hell was never going back to the country of his parents' birth ever again.

“I'm just peachy. Thanks.” Yeah, the party never stopped. “You got a minute?”

“For you? I have all the time you need. Can you hold on for just a minute? Don't hang up, okay?”

Nikhil's finger hovered over the off switch on the phone. He heard some gruff instructions being thrown out. “Okay, I'm back. Thanks for calling. I've been trying to reach you. There's been a theft—”

Nikhil cut him off. “I need some information.”

Rahul huffed out a laugh. “Yeah, you and me both.” The cop had seemed so angry, so dark and brooding, when Nikhil had last seen him, his laugh, even though it was entirely humorless, scrambled Nikhil's already-inside-out brain.

“You think you could help me?”

“I'm sure we can work something out. What do you need?” Despite having let himself go stupid in the head, Nikhil knew when he was being worked over. The cop was welcome to take his best shot.

“Can you find out who has my wife's heart?”

All the wheeler-dealer went out of the cop's voice. “Excuse me?”

“She was on the donor list. They were able to transplant her organs. Can you find out who got her heart?”

There was another long silence, loaded with the cop's brain working so hard and fast Nikhil almost heard the wires shorting. “May I ask why you want to know?” he asked, finally.

“I'll tell you what, you get back to me with the information and I'll fill you in.”

“Sure. This should take me a couple of days. Doctor, listen, it's really critical that I talk to you. Some new information has come up and—”

Nikhil pulled the phone away from his ear. The cop's face when he'd pronounced Jen dead, as if Nikhil had needed the bastard to tell him that, would be an image Nikhil would carry to his grave. And all the lies that had followed after that.

No. He still couldn't do it. Couldn't go back there.

“You know what? I changed my mind. Forget it. Forget I called. Gotta go.”

“Dr. Joshi, listen, don't hang up. I'm not saying I won't help. It's just that—”

Nikhil hung up.

His hand reached for the bottle on his nightstand. It was empty. He'd poured the remaining Jack down the sink when he'd thought he needed his wits about him. Now he turned it over and peeked into it like some drunk frat boy. Not a drop in there.

The clock on the nightstand said six-oh-five. Really? Five minutes, that's how long the call had taken? Would time ever stop feeling like an anchor? Heavy. Immovable.

For all his drunken depravity, Nikhil hadn't yet taken a drink in the morning before going to the clinic. If not for the bone-dry bottle, today would have been the day he turned that corner and went down that road.

* * *

Jess knew she had to give him time. But it had been two days since Nikhil had left his room. Patience might be her strongest suit, but the longer he took, the longer Joy remained in danger.

That hope she'd seen flicker in Nikhil's eyes, no matter how tiny, had been real. She had played it over and over in her head for two days. Held on to it. Despite his science, despite all the logic of his profession, she knew she hadn't imagined it. The thing about being so entirely without hope was that you recognized it in others.

Yes, he believed he'd given up on hope after he lost Jen, but one gossamer thread of it and the belief that somehow it might lead him to her again—any little piece of her—had trumped everything else. And that, no matter how much it sickened her, was her only hope.

She let herself into the red-and-gold confines of her room. The golden clock across from her told her that it was time. She could set that clock by the timing of the phone call. He was never late.

“Your boy looks really nice in blue. Those gray eyes, oh he's going to be such a lady-killer.” No one this evil should have a voice this silky, this harmless. “His daddy must have been one handsome bastard.”

“I'm here, I'm taking care of it. There is nothing more I can possibly do right now.” She shouldn't have let her voice tremble. Showing fear only gave him more power.

“Ah, I forgot how defensive the daddy issue makes you. What is the big secret? I wonder.”

She squeezed the phone between her ear and shoulder and wiped her sweaty palms on her pants. “Dr. Joshi believes me. He's a doctor and I've convinced him.” Or she would as soon as she figured out what else to do. “Isn't it time you backed off the threats?”

“Threats? You think these are threats? This is just the reality of our lives. We're two people trying to keep the things that matter to us safe.” Well, he was correct about that. She would do anything to keep Joy safe, and if she ever found out what he was protecting, she would destroy it in a second.

He had asked her to call him
Naag,
the cobra. It was perfect; his faceless voice called to mind venomous snakes slithering around abandoned temples. A cobra coiled around her baby and threatening to squeeze. “Such a common cause we have. It's almost as if
Mata,
the divine mother herself, put us in each other's path.”

“I told you, he believes me. But he's grieving. I have to be careful.”

“
Arrey wah!
Lots of sympathy the good doctor's getting from you. ‘Grieving,' very nice,” he said in that forked-tongue voice before it turned needle-sharp and stung. “One of the reasons you were chosen was how little you cared for anyone but yourself.” Actually he had chosen her because she was from Nepal and Jen was Chinese and some bastards thought that meant they looked alike. “Don't disappoint me, child.”

The way he called her “child” and made it sound like “bitch” made her skin crawl.

“Of course I care only for myself.”

“And don't forget your son.”

She didn't respond. Joy wasn't apart from her. He was her, all of her.

“I can do this,” she said instead. “You have to trust me.”

“People like us, you and me, since when do we trust anyone? Find a way to get him to stop
grieving
. I'm sure he's in need of some comforting. If you get my meaning.” On that note, he let her go. Well, “let her go” might be a bit wishful. He disconnected the phone, but that faceless voice of his continued to vibrate inside her like fear.

He was right. She had no idea what trust even felt like. So why blame him for seeing the truth? Hating him, letting her blood boil, it was the easy way out. All it would do was distract her from getting what she needed from Nikhil.