Bubble bath and ice cream time.

I send my fax to Collections R Us and throw my pack over my back. My phone rings again. I check the Caller ID. Unidentified caller. Could it be Ty on a different number? I grit my teeth and answer on the last ring. I make a pathetic attempt to hide my surprise when Jake says hello.

“I need your help,” he says, ignoring my high-pitched squeak, “Torment challenged the Pulverizer to fight tonight. The Pulverizer is ranked number one on the U.S. underground fight circuit. Torment flew him in just for the fight.”

“If he wants to fight, he’ll fight. I won’t be able to stop him.”

Jake hisses in a breath. “You don’t understand. He went crazy this week. It’s like he had a death wish. He challenged the three guys in the state ranked above him. He opened the club every night during the week for the fights. He won every match, and now he’s number one.”

“I thought that was his dream.” I stop just outside a convenience store and lean against the wall. “He said he wanted to be number one in California. He said he would be happy when he got to the top.”

“It wasn’t enough.”

Of course not. His father’s words must still haunt him.

“Why do you need me? We aren’t together anymore.”

“You have to come to the club, Makayla.” Jake’s voice takes on a pleading tone. “The Pulverizer has sent every one of his opponents to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. He trains for months before a fight. He’s won his last fourteen matches all by knockout. He’s been undefeated for six years. But he’s a dirty fighter. If he wasn’t on the underground circuit, he would have been kicked out of the professional leagues. Torment is the first real threat he’s faced in years. He’ll come prepared.”

“Max…Torment can handle him. He’s a good fighter. The best now.”

Jake groans. “Max isn’t ready for this fight. He’s tired, he’s injured, and he’s unfocused. He’s fought more this week than the Pulverizer fights in a year, and he won because he was willing to take risks he normally would never take. He can’t fight like that with the Pulverizer. The guy is good. He’s ready. He’s rested. And he’ll fight dirty. One wrong move and Max will be toast.”

My stomach clenches. “What do you want me to do?”

“Come to the club and talk him out of it. I tried. Rampage tried. Hell, we all tried. Even Sandy. He says he’ll be number one if it kills him. And it might kill him. He’s not thinking clearly, and if he can’t focus, he can’t fight.”

“We broke up. He doesn’t want to see me.”

“Please.”

A sob wells up in my throat. “I’m sorry, Jake. It would just prove to him we were never meant to be together, and it wouldn’t change his mind.”

“You’re making a big mistake,” Jake snaps. “If that’s what you think, then you never really understood him at all.”

***

Too distressed to go home, I head to the critical care wing of the hospital to visit Dr. Drake. I have a book of green slips in one hand and a paper clip heart in the other. I hope he gets the joke.

The hallway is cool and quiet. Critical care is a place of emotional extremes. Lives teeter in the balance. One way and families rejoice. The other and they despair. There is a lot of despair here today and only five rooms are occupied.

Dr. Drake is not in his room. They have taken him for CT scans. I sit in a chair in the hallway to wait, and a man in a brown jacket walks into the room across from me. I recognize him from the donut shop, but he isn’t eating donuts today.

The woman he is visiting must be related. They share the same olive skin, dark hair, and patrician nose. She is on life support. Asleep. The machines in her room whir and beep. The man sits by her bed and holds her hand. A nurse goes in to check the monitors and they share a few words. As she leaves, he calls out, “Thank you, Ms. Maloney.”

His voice is familiar. Very familiar. I walk up to the door and check the name on the chart. Gloria Martinez.

“Excuse me?”

The man looks up. Not a man. A boy. No more than twenty. His eyes are dark circles in a sunken face. A face without hope.

“Are you Sergio?”

I catch a flicker of interest in his eyes and he nods.

“I’m Makayla Delaney. You were chasing me for a debt.”

Myriad emotions cross his face. None of them particularly pleasant. “What are you doing here?”

“Visiting a friend.” I take a wild guess given his age and the similarity of his appearance to the woman in the bed. “Is this your mom? Is she the reason you were always calling from the hospital?”

His face crumples. “Yeah. She’s dying. She needs a new heart. But she doesn’t have any medical insurance.”

My heart aches. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’ve sold everything I have to pay for her treatment,” he says, “but I don’t have enough money to get her on the transplant list. If I’d been able to collect enough to get the bonus, I could have bought her a heart.”

He turns his face away and wipes a tear from his cheek. Sympathetic tears well in my own eyes, and my throat tightens.

“Would my payment have made a difference?”

He shakes his head. “Even if I had pushed all my debtors into making their monthly payments, I wouldn’t have had enough. I needed a big windfall—like someone paying the whole loan off at once.”