The air inside Elevator Car 4 was heavy, stale, and smelled faintly of floor wax and the designer cologne of an executive who had stayed too late.

Six months later, the wind off Lake Michigan was biting and cold, but inside the newly opened Cooper-Bennett Medical Research Center on the city’s near-west side, it was warm, bright, and smelled of fresh paint and polished linoleum.

I wasn't wearing a cleaning uniform, and I wasn't wearing a designer silk gown. I wore a crisp white lab coat over my clothes, reviewing patient intake files at the nurse's station of our community cardiac clinic.

After Lucas stepped down, we poured the bulk of his private fortune into funding free cardiac care and emergency response training for low-income neighborhoods across Chicago—the kind of neighborhoods where families couldn't afford an ambulance ride, let alone triple-bypass surgery.

“Dr. Vance is on line two for you, Bailey,” young nurse intern Jenny called out, handing me the desk phone.

I pressed the button. “Vance. I thought you retired to Florida.”

“I did, Bailey,” David Vance’s gravelly voice came through the line. “And it’s boring as hell down here. Besides, I heard you’re taking on twenty new resident nurses from the county college next week. You need someone to teach them how to handle corporate malpractice suits.”

“We’ll take all the help we can get, David,” I smiled.

As I hung up the phone, the glass doors of the clinic slid open, and a tall man in a charcoal sweater walked in, carrying two cups of steaming coffee from the corner bakery.

Lucas walked behind the nurse's station, leaned over my desk, and pressed a paper coffee cup into my hands.

“How’s the heart holding up?” I asked, looking up at him with a grin.

Lucas pressed my hand against the center of his chest, right over the steady, rhythmic thud of a heart that had once stopped beating in an elevator forty-five floors above the city.

“Beating stronger than ever,” he whispered, leaning down to press a soft kiss to my lips. “Thanks to my favorite nurse.”