My Daughter Is Dying, and My Husband Is Saving His Lover's Son novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Beds Side by Side

Clara gets her mother's marrow, and Heidi confronts Brad about the transfers in front of the other parents; he shows her Caden's scan, and it has Clara's birthday in the corner.

They rolled my bed into Clara's room at two in the afternoon.

The doctor had kept his word.

Two beds, side by side, under the window on the seventh floor.

A bag of my blood dripped into my arm.

A bag of my marrow hung on Clara's pole, dark red and thick as jam.

"That's you," Clara said.

"That's me."

"It looks like ketchup."

"Thank you."

The transplant nurse checked the line one more time and started the pump.

There was no ceremony. It looked like any other bag.

Clara watched it creep down the tube toward her chest.

"Will I turn into you?"

"Only a little. You'll get my blood type."

"Will I like coffee?"

"God, I hope not."

She reached across the gap between the beds.

Her hand was cold and dry and light as paper.

I held it while the bag emptied.

She told me four jokes, all bad.

"Why did the cookie go to the doctor?"

"Why?"

"Because it felt crummy."

"That's terrible."

"You laughed."

"I'm on drugs."

She fell asleep with her fingers still hooked on mine.

The bag was empty by four.

Brad came at five-thirty.

He knocked on the glass door and didn't come in.

I took my IV pole, the blood still dripping, and went out to him in my gown and socks.

Every step felt like walking on a broken hip.

"You shouldn't be up," he said.

"Lounge," I said.

The family lounge was at the end of the hall.

A donated piano nobody could play stood against one wall.

Three parents sat at the long table eating takeout from foil trays.

A dad with a toddler asleep on his chest was watching muted cartoons.

Brad tried to steer me to the corner.

I sat down at the long table instead and put my phone on it, face up.

"Eleven transfers," I said. "Since August. Every one of them out of the Clara fund."

Brad looked at the parents.

"Let's do this at home."

"I live here now. Read the memo line."

He didn't.

So I read it for him.

"Hope for C. Four thousand. Hope for C. Six thousand. Hope for C. Two thousand five hundred."

A woman at the end of the table put down her fork.

"Last night it was nine thousand," I said. "Nine thousand, while I was on the phone begging to give her my marrow."

"It's a loan," Brad said.

"To who?"

"To Caden! Caden is sick too, Heidi! You don't get to have the only sick kid in the world!"

The toddler's dad looked up from the cartoons.

"That money was Clara's medicine fund," I said.

"Insurance covers her medicine."

"The fund covers everything else. My mortgage payments while I can't work. The parking. The hotel if we have to come back. Fifty-five thousand of it was my bakery."

"And thirty-one thousand was the neighbors, so don't act like it was all you."

"The neighbors gave it to Clara."

"The neighbors gave it to a sick child!" He was loud now. "Caden is a sick child! He's got a rare blood disorder. The clinic in Cleveland doesn't take insurance. Do you know what that's like for Tasha? Alone?"

"She has sixty-one thousand followers. She's not alone."

"You've never even asked about him," Brad said. "Not once. You hate that kid because he's hers."

The woman at the end of the table was very carefully not looking at us.

She was looking at us anyway.

"I don't hate him," I said. "I want to see one thing. One piece of paper that says he's sick."

Brad laughed through his nose.

He took out his phone and swiped hard.

"Fine. Here. His latest scan. Tasha sent it to me in January."

He held it up in front of my face.

"That's what she's living with. You want to tell her it's fake?"

It was a PET scan, the full-body kind.

A small skeleton lit up in gray and white.

The bright spots in the hip bones where the leukemia had been hiding.

The little dark bead of the port under the right collarbone.

I knew that skeleton.

I had held its hand in the scanner room and sung to it so it wouldn't move.

I took the phone out of his hand.

I spread two fingers on the screen and zoomed in on the bottom corner.

Tasha had cropped off the name.

She'd cropped off the hospital.

She had forgotten one gray line of text in the corner.

DOB: 03/12.

And the year my daughter was born.

"Brad," I said. "Whose birthday was yesterday?"

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