On Saturday morning, his father volunteered to walk.
This had never happened before, in either life, and Owen should have taken it as a sign that something was wrong. Instead he took it as a victory.
"It's not a weekday," Owen said, at the bottom of the stairs, in his sneakers. "Clause five is weekdays."
"I know what clause five is. I signed it with a wrench." His father was by the door in the CALLERY jacket, zipped to the chin, holding his travel mug. "Your mother gets home at quarter to eight. If I'm walking, I'm not getting yelled at about the bacon."
"There's bacon?"
"There's turkey bacon," his father said, with the bitterness of a man who had seen the face of God and been told it was low-sodium. "Come on. Before I change my mind."
It was cold and bright outside, the first real sun in a week. The neighborhood was the kind of neighborhood where every house had a basketball hoop and none of them had a net. Owen and his father did the mailbox intervals down Larch Street, walking fast between three mailboxes and slow between the next three, the way Owen had set it up on Sunday. His dad hated the fast part, out loud, every time.
"This is a scam," he said, at the third fast stretch. "Somebody invented mailboxes to sell sneakers."
"Mailboxes are federal property, Dad."
"Exactly."
They turned onto the creek path. Through the trees, Owen could see the footbridge: an old green metal thing with fourteen steps up one side and fourteen down, over the drainage creek that ran behind the middle school. His father had been slow on those steps every day this week. Owen had been noting it in the notebook. Mon: slow. Tue: slow, stopped at top. Wed: slow. Thu: stopped twice. Fri: said it was his knee.
He'd been counting. He'd been counting, and writing it down like a sync number, like a thing you graph and watch go up, and he hadn't done anything about it except write it down.
His dad started up the steps.
He made it to the ninth step before he stopped.
It wasn't dramatic. That was what Owen would remember later, when he lay awake trying to rewind it. Nobody grabbed their chest like in a movie. His father just stopped, with one hand on the rail and his travel mug in the other, and stood there, breathing through his mouth.
"Dad?"
"Gimme a sec."
"Dad, are you—"
"It's the heartburn." His father put the travel mug down on the step, carefully, the way you'd put down something you didn't trust yourself to hold. "The turkey bacon. I told your mother. It's not real bacon. My stomach doesn't know what it is."
He wasn't sweating, exactly. But his face had gone a color Owen had never seen on it before, the gray-white of old paper, and his right hand was pressed flat against the middle of his chest, just under the zipper of the jacket, the way you'd hold down a stack of papers in the wind.
Owen had seen that hand before.
Not on his father. On a hundred men he'd never met: in the videos Lattice ran, years later, after the Safe Immersion Act, when they'd been forced to put a heart-health warning in every login screen. Chest pressure. Pain in the arm, jaw or back. Shortness of breath. Don't wait. He'd skipped that video every time. He'd hit the X so many times that he knew exactly where it was on the screen.
He'd never thought about it once in the parking lot. Afterward. Waiting.
"Sit down," Owen said.
"I'm fine."
"Dad. Sit down." His voice came out wrong, too high, and his father looked at him, startled. Then, slowly, he sat on the eighth step with his knees up, like a kid waiting for a bus.
Owen sat next to him. He didn't know what to do with his hands. He put one on his father's back, between the shoulder blades, through the jacket, and he could feel the breath going in and out, too fast.
"Does it hurt in your arm?"
"No."
"Your jaw?"
"Why would it hurt in my jaw, Owen?"
"Does it?"
"No." A long breath. "It's a squeeze. That's all. It's like a fist. It does this sometimes on the stairs at the shop and it goes away."
Sometimes.
"How long has it done this?"
His father didn't answer.
"Dad. How long."
"Since Christmas," his father said at last, staring at the creek. "Maybe the fall. It's heartburn, bud. It's always heartburn. Everybody at the shop's got it. Carl's got it. You eat lunch out of a truck for twenty years, you get heartburn."
Owen took out his phone.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm calling Mom."
"Don't call your mother, she's driving."
"Then she can pull over," Owen said, and his father, for the first time in Owen's memory, shut up.
His mother answered on the second ring, with the flat calm she used for work. He told her: the steps, the ninth step, the hand on the chest, the squeeze, since Christmas, maybe the fall. She asked him four questions in a row, fast, like a checklist. Was he sweating. Was he short of breath sitting down. Was the pain going anywhere. Was it getting better or worse with rest.
"Better," said his father, loud enough for the phone. "It's going away. Dana, it's going away."
"Put him on," said his mother.
Owen held the phone out. His father took it the way you'd take a summons.
"Hi, hon."
Owen couldn't hear what his mother said. He could only hear the tone, and the tone was very quiet, and his father's face changed while he listened, slowly, from annoyed to something else. He said, "Yeah." He said, "Okay." He said, "About four minutes now. Less." He said, "No, I'm not going to the—Dana. Dana. It's going away. I can feel it going." He said, "Yeah. I know." Then, very quietly, in a voice Owen had never heard him use: "Yeah, I know you've seen it."
"She's five minutes away," his father said. "She says we sit here. She says if it comes back or gets worse, you call 911 and you don't let me argue." He looked down at his hands. "She says you did good."
Owen didn't say anything. He was afraid of what his voice would do.
No permission was given to copy this passage from the author's story page. Reading the official publication supports the person behind it.
They sat on the eighth step of the footbridge, father and son, in the cold sun, with a travel mug of coffee between them, and listened to the creek. A woman walked by with a golden retriever and said good morning. His father said good morning back, like a normal person on a normal Saturday.
After a while, his father said, "It's gone."
"Okay."
"It's really gone. I'm fine."
"Okay."
"You can take your hand off my back, bud."
Owen didn't.
His father let him.
His mother pulled up at the end of the creek path in her scrubs nine minutes later, which was four minutes more than she'd promised, because she'd stopped at the pharmacy for a bottle of baby aspirin. She came down the path not running, but walking very fast, the way nurses did in hallways. She crouched in front of her husband on the steps, took his wrist in two fingers, and looked at her watch. She looked at his face for a long time. She asked him to breathe in and out. She asked him the same four questions again, and some new ones, and he answered all of them without one joke, which scared Owen more than anything else had.
"Okay," she said at last. "Chew this." She gave him an aspirin. "Not the whole bottle, Rick. One."
"I know how aspirin works."
"You know how cars work." She stood up. Her face was very calm. Her hands, Owen noticed, were not. "This wasn't heartburn."
"It might've been heartburn."
"It might have been. And if it wasn't, the next one might not stop on the ninth step." She held out her hand and pulled him up. "Here's what's going to happen. We're going home. You're going to take it easy today. You're not going to the shop. And on Monday morning, I'm going to call Dr. Mehta's office myself, from the parking lot at work, and I'm going to get you in this week. Not before summer. This week."
"Clause six says before summer," his father said, and there was a ghost of the joke in it.
"Clause six," said his mother, "has been amended."
She called on Monday, but she didn't wait until Monday to make it happen.
Back at the house, while his father sat at the kitchen table eating plain oatmeal with an expression of betrayed innocence, Owen's mother sat on the back step with her phone and texted three people in a row. One was the charge nurse on her floor. One was a woman named Aimee who worked at the cardiology practice across the street from St. Joseph's and owed her a favor from 2019. One was Dr. Mehta's personal email, which she apparently had, which she apparently was not supposed to have.
By ten o'clock, his father had an appointment for Tuesday at 8:15 AM: a physical, bloodwork, an EKG in the office, and, if the EKG said anything interesting, a referral for something called a stress test.
"What's a stress test?" said Maddie.
"It's when they put you on a treadmill and see if your heart does anything weird," said his mother.
"That's just what Owen's been doing to him all week."
"Yes," said his mother, after a pause. "It is."
Maddie looked at Owen across the kitchen. She'd come down in her owl pajamas at the sound of the front door and found her father pale at the table and her mother in scrubs and her brother standing by the sink not saying anything, and she'd figured out the shape of it immediately, because Maddie always figured out the shape of things. She'd gone very quiet and made her father a cup of decaf without being asked, and had put it in front of him, and then gone to stand next to Owen.
"Is Dad okay?" she said now, very low.
"He's okay," said Owen. "Right now. We're going to make sure."
"Is it because of the bacon?"
"It's because of a lot of bacon. For a long time."
Maddie thought about this. "Should I be walking too?"
"You play soccer, Mads. You're fine."
"I want to walk with you guys," she said, a bit fiercely. "Clause five. I'm amending it."
Owen looked at his sister. Twelve, for two more weeks. Owl pajamas. A face like their mother's when it got stubborn.
"Okay," he said. "Weekdays. Six-thirty. We'll put you on it."
At 1:10 PM, because he didn't know what else to do with his hands, he lay down on the dinosaur blanket and put on the headset.
He'd made a Clear Draft at lunch out of habit, measuring the salt while his father ate oatmeal, and drunk half of it without tasting it. He wasn't going to play. He'd told himself that. He just wanted to see the number. It was the thing he'd done in his first life when something went wrong: put on the headset, check the number, as if the number could tell him how he was.
[LATTICE OS v1.0.4]
[Calibrating... please lie still and breathe normally.]
It took longer than usual. Twenty seconds. Twenty-five. He could feel his own heart going in his ears, too fast, and he couldn't slow it. He tried four long breaths. They came out shaky.
[Baseline synchronization estimate: 46%]
[Modifier active: Hydrated (Clear Draft) +3%, 3h 12m remaining]
[Modifier detected: Acute stress (-5%)]
[Elevated heart rate at rest. If you feel unwell, please remove your headset.]
He looked at the third line. Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
He'd never seen that one either, in his first life. Or he had seen it, a hundred times, and dismissed it every time before he could read it. Acute stress. The machine had looked at his heart and his skin and the little electric storm in his arms, and it had worked out that something had happened to him this morning. It didn't know what. It just knew the shape of it.
Forty-six. With the drink. Without it, forty-three, back below where he'd started on launch day. A week of sleep and water and walks, gone in one morning on a footbridge.
Sleep debt is the single biggest negative, his mother had said on the first night. She hadn't said anything about fear, because she didn't know he'd need to hear it.
The river was coming up. Harrowgate. He could already hear the waterwheel.
He took the headset off.
[Session cancelled during calibration.]
He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling for a long time.
He thought about the parking lot. He'd never been in the parking lot, that was the thing. He'd been on this same bed, in a headset, leading a dungeon run for a guild that wouldn't remember his name, while his phone lit up on the nightstand eleven times. By the time he'd logged out and called back, four hours had gone, and his father had gone into surgery and not come out. The heart attack had happened in the parking lot of the shop where he'd worked for twenty-two years. A Tuesday. Afterward, a cardiologist with kind eyes had said the damage had been building for years, and asked about heartburn, and Owen had said he didn't know, because he hadn't been there to know. At the funeral, people kept saying it was out of nowhere, and Owen had let them, because he'd needed to.
Since Christmas, his father had said, on the ninth step. Maybe the fall.
It hadn't come out of nowhere. It had been squeezing his father's chest on the stairs at work for ten years, probably, and getting worse, and his father had called it heartburn, and nobody had asked, because his son was busy.
Owen picked up the notebook from the nightstand. He looked at the week. Mon: slow. Tue: slow, stopped at top. He'd been graphing it like a sync number.
Under Saturday, he wrote: 9th step. Hand on chest. "Since Christmas." Mom: not heartburn. Dr. Mehta Tue 8:15. EKG. Maybe stress test.
Under that, he wrote: Don't count things you can fix. Fix them.
Then he went downstairs.
His father was on the couch, under protest, watching a show about people who restored old trucks, with a blanket over his knees that Maddie had tucked around him with surgical precision.
"Shouldn't you be in your game?" he said when Owen came in. "It's Saturday. You've got the whole day."
"I'm good."
"You've been talking about this game for six months. It's the first weekend. Go play your game."
"Later," said Owen, and sat down at the other end of the couch.
His father looked at him for a second. Then he moved his feet over to make more room.
On the TV, a man with a mustache was pulling the engine out of a 1971 pickup and talking about the rust like it was an old friend. "See this?" the man said, pointing at a dark streak on the block. "This is where she's been telling you. Been telling you for years. You just weren't listening."
"Oh, come on," said Owen.
His father laughed. It was the big stupid laugh, and it wheezed at the end, and he stopped and put his hand flat on his chest for a second, just to check. Then he took it away.
"Heartburn," his father said.
"Dad."
"I'm kidding. I'm kidding." He held up both hands. "Tuesday. Eight-fifteen. I'll go. I'll do the treadmill. I'll pee in the cup. Whatever they want."
They watched the man with the mustache take out the rest of the engine. Maddie came and sat between them with a bowl of popcorn that she'd made with no butter, out of respect, and that was therefore inedible. Their mother came down at three in a hoodie, having slept two hours after a night shift because she couldn't sleep longer, and sat on the arm of the couch next to her husband and put her hand on the back of his neck and left it there.
Nobody said anything about it. The truck show went to a commercial. A man in a suit stood in front of a blue ring and said, Lattice. A world that moves with you.
"That's your game," said Maddie.
"That's my game," said Owen.
"That guy's smile is creepy."
"He's the CEO."
"His smile is really creepy," said Maddie, and their father laughed again, carefully, and nobody looked at his chest.
At 4:30, his father fell asleep on the couch with his mouth open, snoring. His mother checked his pulse while he slept, like she was just touching his wrist, and then went back upstairs. Maddie went to her room to watch videos about Rangers.
Owen sat at the end of the couch for a while longer, listening to the snoring. It was a terrible snore. It sounded like a truck engine that needed rebuilding. It was the most beautiful sound he'd ever heard.
His phone buzzed.
Theo: you on?? its saturday. ridge??
Owen: Family stuff. My dad had a scare. He's okay
Theo: oh shit
Theo: is he ok ok
Owen: Yeah. Doctor Tuesday. Mom's on it
Theo: ok. tell him i said hi. no ridge, we'll do it whenever
Theo: and dude. i'm glad you were there
Owen read the last text three times.
Me too, he typed. He looked at it for a while. Then he sent it.
Then he went upstairs and drank a bottle of water, and did twenty squats, and lay down on his bed with his eyes closed and did the four long breaths until his heart stopped racing.
Then he did them again.
The headset was on the nightstand, its blue ring dark. In a few hours he'd try again. He'd see what the number said. It would be lower than he wanted. That was fine. He'd learned that today too: you didn't get to pick the day you were tested. You just had to be ready on the day you got.
Downstairs, his father snored on.