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her throw up the same walls he had. She pulled away, retracting her hand and placing it neatly on her lap.
    “How long have you used Ritalin?”
    Warren looked away, feeling muscles in his jaw work and trying not to feel whiplashed by her abrupt turn of conversation. “Since I was seventeen.”
    “How often?”
    “Every day for six years,” he ground out. Her eyebrows arched again.
    “Your prescription says otherwise,” she mentioned.
    “A lot of things about me say otherwise,” Warren retorted, feeling like his insides had been scraped raw, and they were threatening to explode outward. “You wanna know what else? I had a drinking problem back when I was 22. Nearly shot my liver all for a stupid drinking contest that gave me alcohol poisoning and disappointed everyone in my family… I hurt my baby sister with that stupid choice. My father’s got this idiot obsession with horse races, don’t blame him, I like them too. He knew that I’ve got issues keeping still, but he insisted I get on a bucking horse anyway. He blamed me for getting unhorsed and nearly shattering my pelvis, but he had no problem stuffing vicodin down my throat. So long as I was up on my feet and not being an embarrassment to my family. So yeah, if you want to guess which of those things caused my arrhythmia—among other things, I’m sure—you can start there. Are we done?”
    There was a tense silence that passed between them, framed by the quickened beeps of the heart monitor. His doctor said nothing for a moment, but he could see how her fingers fidgeted against her scrubs, and he could sense the uneasiness coiling in her figure just as easily.
    “Why are you alone, Warren?” she asked softly. The tone in her voice startled him. And then when she looked up at him, he couldn’t help shivering.
    “Because I chose to be,” he said.
    She left moments later, and he tried to ignore the ramming sensation in his heart beep in sync with the monitor blaring next to his bed.
    --

Chapter 10
    --
    She couldn’t avoid him after that. Not after she had unintentionally exposed him like that.
    Melinda had been unable to shake away Warren’s final words to her. In her mind, they turned and turned, appearing and reappearing while she worked and when she took her coffee breaks. Driving home after that conversation had left her unable to turn on her radio and listen to songs until she faded away. She couldn’t seem to puzzle over the conundrum of it all.
    A man who had everything, had chosen to have nothing.
    In the end, isn’t that a certain contradiction of everything she had believed people to want? People lied to have their hands on everything, yet this man exposed himself to the truth for the sake of being left in his own grief. He didn’t even bother keeping his own secrets to himself, secrets that spoke of a lifestyle that while grand on the outside was as empty as hers.
    They walked different walks of life. Their feet should be carrying them in other places…yet they met somewhere in the center… where they couldn’t not deny similarities.
    Melinda paused in the middle of that thought.
    Warren had been the one to speak his mind, not her. He had answered her questions, and given her half-glares that reminded her of a wounded animal that bared its teeth at its most vulnerable. He didn’t bothering hiding that much either—or if he did she saw straight through it.
    Why are you alone?
    Because I chose to be.
    “Doctor?”
    Melinda blinked, and she felt her stomach jump to her chest. She stopped, glancing down and taking in her surroundings once more, unable to remember when she had drifted from her destination to her office, only to end up on the very threshold that opened into the room of the man whom had occupied her mind for the past few hours.
    Warren was looking at her quizzically, sitting up on his bed with a fork in hand and a plate of cafeteria food in the other. For the first time since he had arrived, Melinda took in his