A Change of Heart by Sonali Dev Page B

eyes glittered with conviction, the kind of conviction that reminded him of patients after the worst kind of trauma, a vulnerable, bleeding sort of determination that was a silence so powerful, no stringing together of words could match it.
    He turned back to the blinding blue of the ocean. The railing reached his waist. Not for the first time, the urge to let go grabbed him. All it would take was releasing his grip, and gravity would take care of the rest.
    â€œSeems like the easiest way out, doesn’t it?” Her voice flew around his neck like a noose and yanked him back.
    She leaned into the railing beside him, her body adding to the push against the metal keeping his body from escape. The wind picked up whatever perfume she was wearing and swirled it around him. There was something melancholy about the scent, like soporific hemp and meditative incense that made your limbs heavy even as it lightened the weight of the world.
    Maybe it was her melancholic air, maybe it was that terror he’d witnessed in her eyes earlier, or maybe it was the fact that every heart transplant patient had glimpsed their own mortality, but he recognized surmounted suffering when he saw it. She had the look of someone who had hiked to the top of the mountain and back, but had lost a limb in the process and wasn’t quite sure it had been worth it.
    He turned to her. “You sound like you’ve considered it too.” This coward’s madness balanced on the edge of a metal railing.
    Her breathing stayed steady, but the effort of keeping it steady increased the slightest bit, the way one breathed for a stethoscope. “No. I’ve never contemplated killing myself. It’s a luxury I couldn’t afford.”
    He heard himself laughing again and hated the sound. Luxury? Wasn’t it just great that he understood exactly what she meant?
    She stuck out her chin again, her stance that of a pugilist bracing herself for impact. “You should try anger instead.”
    She sounded so much like Jen when he’d first met her. Jen had been so angry at everyone and everything. “I’m going to make this world a better place if it kills me,” was her unspoken mantra.
    Well, didn’t irony suck balls.
    But Jen’s anger had always been on behalf of other people, against the injustices she loved to go hurtling after. This woman’s anger, when she let it out, was an armor. She was protecting only herself. That knowledge only intensified his ache for his wife.
    â€œAnger can help you deal with just about everything.” The bitter edge in her voice was a serrated knife against the wound he had let her rip open.
    â€œOh, I’m plenty angry.” It hadn’t gotten him through shit. “Jen used to hate that I didn’t get angry enough.” He’d always told her there was too much anger in the world as it is, and he had never felt the need to add to it.
    She should see him now.
    â€œActually, she was really proud of you for it,” Jess said, and paused to gauge if she should go on. “Maybe she was even a little jealous.”
    He was going to regret this, but he leapt onto that, panting for a scrap like a starving dog. “What else did she . . .” He leaned his head back and let the salty air slap his face. “What else did she say?”
    She turned to him, leaning a hip against the railing. He had expected to hear triumph in her voice, but there was only more of that relief and the ubiquitous sympathy. “Where do I start? Your wife thought you were . . . Let me just say, I was shocked to find that you didn’t have wings. Or a halo.” There was the faintest smile in her voice and he turned to look at it. It was a tight, restrained thing. But he was pretty sure it was a smile. Then it fell away and she looked surprised at what she’d just said.
    â€œYeah, the bracing ocean breeze took off with the wings and the Caribbean fun-shine has a way of