They Called Me Selfish. My Kidney Saved Her Life. novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Gala

Cosima's POV

Cora took the stage in white silk, and four hundred people stood and applauded her.

I stood too, because everyone did, and then I sat down again with my hands in my lap.

My mother was crying already.

My father had his arm around her, and neither of them had looked at me since the soup.

"Thank you," Cora said into the microphone, and let the room go quiet. "Thank you all. Not long ago, I was told I might not see my twenty-sixth birthday."

A sound moved through the ballroom.

"I was so frightened. I'll be honest with you. I lay in a bed in this very hospital, and I watched my mother pray, and I watched my father learn to cook, and I thought, I don't deserve this much love."

My mother sobbed out loud.

Cora paused and wiped under her eye with one finger.

She was good. She had always been good.

I watched the screen above her, where the photographs began to turn.

Cora at a window in a paper gown. Cora with an IV. Cora laughing in a wheelchair, with my mother's hand on her shoulder.

I was in none of them.

I had not been in a single photograph in the entire book of her illness, and I realized it only now.

"And then a stranger came forward," Cora said. "A woman I'll never be able to repay. She asked for no name and no thanks. All I know is that she gave me a second life."

The room applauded again, softly.

"I'd like to thank her tonight, wherever she is." She lowered her voice. "And I'd like to do something harder. I'd like to forgive my own sister, who said no."

The silence was total.

Then, from somewhere to my left, a man's chair scraped.

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