They Gave My Heart to My Sister and Forgot My Last Birthday novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Muffin

In Donovan's car Deirdre gets her drip, a birthday muffin and a deal with no lies in it, then hears her father has reported her kidnapped.

I got into the car because my legs were done.

That was the whole reason, and I told myself so on the way down onto the leather seat.

The door shut and the rain went quiet.

The man driving wore a flat cap and turned around in his seat to grin at me.

"Don't worry, love, I'm the nice one," he said. "Dermot. I'm his cousin. He's the one with the face."

"Drive," said Donovan Mulcahy.

Dermot drove.

Donovan didn't say anything else for a block.

He reached down to the floor and came up with a black medical bag, and he opened it on his knee.

Inside were a pulse monitor, two sealed drug cartridges and a spare battery for the exact model of pump on my shoulder.

I stared at them.

"Those are mine," I said.

"They're the right ones for you. The pharmacy at St. Brendan's has them locked up. Mine doesn't."

"You knew my drug."

"I knew your chart," Donovan said. "Give me your hand."

I didn't.

"You walked out with a drip that runs dry in about four hours," he said. "I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking for your hand."

I gave it to him.

He clipped the monitor on my finger first.

Then he turned my wrist over under the dome light and laid two fingers and his thumb on the pulse.

His hand was warm and very dry, and the ink on it ran up under his cuff in dark lines I could have followed with my eyes.

The thumb didn't move.

It rested there, and my heart did what it always did now, stumbling and catching up and stumbling again.

His face didn't change.

I watched it not change.

"Hundred and thirty," he said to Dermot. "Marblehead, and wake the house doctor."

He let go of my wrist.

The seat was the first soft thing I had touched in three months, and the road was tilting.

Then Dermot said, "Happy birthday, by the way."

I turned my head.

"Donovan said it was today. I didn't have a cake." He reached into the console without looking and held up a gas station muffin with a pink birthday candle stuck in it. "I had this."

I took it.

It was crushed on one side, and it was the first birthday present I'd had that day.

I held it in both hands.

"How did you know?" I asked Donovan. "It's not in any chart."

"It was on the card."

"The envelope my father took."

"Yes."

"Who's it from?"

"Not tonight," he said. "Ask me again when you can stand up."

I should have pushed.

I knew that even then.

But the muffin was in my lap and my chest was tight, and I was too tired to fight a man who had just pulled a pump battery out of a bag for me.

"Why are you doing this?" I said instead. "My father has hated your family for twenty years. You cleared out his safe in July."

"I cleared out his safe because somebody sold me the alarm sheet," said Donovan. "I'll tell you that story another time."

"Somebody."

"A Kilbride."

I thought of Maeve's phone, held low against her hip.

Donovan watched me think it.

"You saw her," he said.

"I told him I saw her. He called me a liar in front of my whole family."

"I believe you," Donovan said.

"Here is what I want," Donovan said. "Your father keeps a ledger. Green cloth, in a place that isn't the safe. It shows every payment he's made to that hospital's committee in fifteen years. I want it."

"You want me to hand you my family's books."

"I want you to tell me where he keeps them, once you're stable enough to be asked. That's the price."

"And mine?"

He turned and looked at me.

His eyes were grey, and he waited to hear what I wanted.

Nobody in my family had waited for that in months.

"A doctor," I said. "Then my name back. My place, in front of everyone who watched him do that to me. I want him to say it was wrong."

"He won't."

"Then I want him to watch me live."

Donovan nodded once.

"Then we have terms. Nobody lies to the other. If I can't tell you something, I'll say 'not yet,' and you can ask me again."

"And if you lie?"

"Then you walk out of my house, and I'll open the door."

I looked at the muffin.

"Fine," I said. "No lies."

His hand came out and I shook it, and I felt the tattooed line along his wrist against my own bracelet.

I was still holding on when Dermot said, "Donny."

His voice had changed.

He had one hand on the wheel and his phone raised in the other, and the screen was playing a local news clip with the sound low.

A reporter stood in the rain outside St. Brendan's, and behind her I could see the lobby doors.

"...Desmond Kilbride, board chair of the hospital, says his critically ill daughter was taken from her bed this afternoon," she said. "He has named Donovan Mulcahy and says police are on their way to Marblehead."

I went cold and still.

"Well," he said. "Now you decide whether you're my guest or my hostage."

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