He Took My Love 99 Times. The 100th Time, He Lost Me Forever. novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Nineteen

I sat back down on the top step, because my knees had decided for me.

Fabrizio stayed on the bottom one with the rain in his hair.

"Tell me the rest," I said.

"You won't like it."

"I haven't liked anything since the ballroom."

He almost smiled.

It was the first smile I'd seen on him that wasn't practiced, and it looked terrible.

"I was nineteen," he said. "My father's heart was failing."

"I know. You told me he was sick."

"I never told you how close it was. The doctors gave him a month. The transplant list was two years long."

He rubbed his wet face with both hands.

"My mother found a way to shorten it."

"How?"

"There was a man on the hospital's transplant committee. His wife was dying, and he'd felt nothing for her in twenty years. He wanted to love her before the end."

"So he bought love."

"He didn't want a percent." Fabrizio's voice stayed flat. "He wanted a whole one. All of it, from one person, for one person."

I felt the cold of the stone come up through my dress.

"Yours."

"Mine. Every bit. A full draw, in one afternoon, and it doesn't grow back. That's the rule with a full draw. Nobody told me that part until I'd signed."

"Who did you love, Fabrizio? Whose love was it?"

He looked at me for a long moment.

"My father's," he said. "That's who I had. That's who I loved, all of it, the way you love one person at nineteen."

I put my hand over my mouth.

"I sold the love I had for my father," he said, "to buy my father a new heart."

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