Chapter 10: The Man Who Knew

Donovan's POV

At five in the morning I was sitting on the floor of my sister's room with a folder on my knees.

I had not yet decided to wake Deirdre.

Deirdre was asleep down the hall with her hair on my pillow.

I had meant to tell her last night.

I had meant to do it before the stairs, before the bed, before I put my mouth on her and heard her say my name.

I had gone up those stairs with the whole truth in my chest, and I had said nothing.

That was the lie, and it was twelve days old.

At midnight on the twentieth, a nurse at St. Brendan's phoned me and said my sister was in the trauma bay.

Dermot drove, and I didn't remember a single turn.

Kathleen was on the table with a tube in her throat.

A truck had run a red light on Route 1A and hit the driver's door.

The surgeon told me what the scan showed, in a plain, kind voice.

I held her hand, and her fingers were still warm.

At four in the morning a woman in a green jacket asked if she could speak to me about donation.

She had a clipboard, and she said it gently, and I said Kathleen wasn't the kind of girl who'd signed up for anything.

"She signed in March," the woman said. "She filled in the directed section. She named a recipient."

"A what?"

"A person she wants her heart to go to, if it can. A friend."

She showed me the form.

It had Kathleen's handwriting on it and a date in March, and one name in block capitals.

DEIRDRE KILBRIDE.

I knew the name from my sister's mouth every Thursday for six months.

I also knew it as the name of the family I'd spent twenty years fighting.

For about the length of a breath I thought about tearing up the paper.

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Gave My Heart to My Sister and Forgot My Last Birthday from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.