Author’s Note

If you are disgusted and/or disturbed by what you just read, don’t worry – you’re supposed to be. I have written many scenes over the years that some readers might find disturbing, but as of summer 2019, I don’t think I’ve written anything that has disturbed me more than this chapter (and Chapter 31… and really this whole novel, LOL). It’s at this point in the story that I feel obliged to give some explanation of why.

I came up with the premise for this story in June 2017, as I was finishing Sick as My Secrets, but the inspiration for these last two chapters actually goes back to December 2007 and the end of By My Side. While I was writing the resuscitation scene in Chapter 196 of BMS, I was looking up info on CPR, trying my best to make it realistic and not like the fake stuff you see in movies and TV medical dramas. I was searching YouTube and came across a short video of a blurred-out topless woman being resuscitated in the hospital. At first glance, it looked real, and much like the morbid fascination of driving past a bad car accident, I didn’t really want to watch and yet couldn’t bring myself to look away. After watching it, I discovered there were many more clips just like it posted by the same account and realized they were all just trailers for some kind of medical fetish porn site. Well, of course they were – prior to researching for this story, everything I’d ever learned about fetishes came from accidentally stumbling onto weird shit while researching for Broken/BMS. Aside from being disturbed by the fact that there are apparently people out there with a CPR fetish (I’ve since found out their community calls it a “resus” fetish), I didn’t think much more about it until almost ten years later, when I was researching for a similar hospital scene at the end of Sick as My Secrets. As I went back and reread that chapter of BMS for inspiration, I suddenly remembered that video, and I had one of those magical lightbulb moments of inspiration – not for SAMS, but for a new story. What if someone with a CPR/resus fetish were to kidnap people and make their hearts stop so she could play out her sick fantasy in real life?

I have always wanted to write a crazy fan kidnapping story, along the same lines of Stephen King’s Misery. Seriously, it’s been on my list of story seeds since the early 2000s, but I never could come up with a solid enough concept to actually write it. The closest I ever came was with an idea I was going to call Nonfiction about a fanfic writer who stalks and tortures the Boys one by one in ways that come from popular fanfic plots. For example, she was going to give Brian something that would affect his heart because of all the Brian heart problem stories there used to be. I even had an outline started for that one, but it never amounted to anything.

As much as I love suspense and thrillers, I decided a long time ago (during the writing of You’ll Never Walk Alone) that I suck at suspense and would never attempt to write another one because I’m too cliched, not creative enough, and people always figure out “whodunit” right away, which is no fun when you’re trying to write a mystery. But then I thought, What if I set it up so the readers don’t know it’s supposed to be a suspense? What if I make it look like just another medical drama at first?

I have always been fascinated by cases of Munchausen by proxy, which most commonly involves a mother fabricating her child’s illness or actually making them sick. The idea of a “fan” with medical training making one of the Backstreet Boys (and the readers) believe he was critically ill so she could get close to him and “take care” of him while simultaneously keeping him sick to feed her fetish appealed to me because it was a different and much more twisted take on the medical dramas I’ve written in the past.

I hoped A Heart That Isn’t Mine would seem a little like Curtain Call, a hurt/comfort story about the relationship between a nurse and the sick Backstreet Boy she’s been charged with taking care of. I wanted the readers to start rooting for Nick and Dani to get together, the way they rooted for Nick and Cary in Curtain Call… so I could sweep the rug right out from under their feet when they realized that, unlike sweet Cary, Dani’s a fucking psycho who has been making Nick sick this whole time. (Sing it with me now: “Oh, she’s sweet but a psycho, a little bit psycho…”) That is mean of me, I know, but I hope you can appreciate the twist if it took you by surprise. (There are a couple of you who have been suspicious of Dani all along, and I seriously commend you for being such critical readers! Here I thought I was being so clever, that no one would ever see it coming, and some of you called her out on being full of shit way back in Chapter 4! See, this is why I swore I would never write another suspense! LOL)

I guess I just wanted to give you a bit of an explanation for where this came from so you wouldn’t wonder about me. As much as I love reading and writing medical stuff, I don’t have a fetish for it, and although I enjoy torturing the Boys in stories, I would never want them to be sick or hurt in real life. All the characters in this story, besides the Boys, are figments of my (admittedly fucked-up) imagination and not based on anyone I actually know.

Now that that’s out the way… thanks for making it this far into this weird, twisted story of mine! I hope you’ll keep reading and enjoy the rest!

~Julie