They Gave My Heart to My Sister and Forgot My Last Birthday novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: One in Five

The Mulcahys kept a private surgical suite in a brick building in Salem, with no sign on the door.

Dermot drove me there at ten at night with the wipers on high.

Donovan sat in the back beside me and didn't talk.

The surgeon met us in the hall with her mask around her neck.

She was brisk and tired and she looked at me, not at Donovan.

"It's a pump that sits next to your own heart and does the heavy lifting," she said. "It buys you time for a real transplant. It doesn't replace one."

"What are the odds?" I asked.

"One in five that you don't wake up."

"And without it?"

"Two days, maybe three."

I nodded.

It was an easy sum.

They put me on a table under lights so bright I closed my eyes.

A man at my head with a clipboard asked me to say my name and my date of birth.

"Deirdre Kilbride. October twenty-first."

"Happy birthday," he said, in a flat polite voice.

It was the second time anyone had said it to me that day.

Dermot leaned in the door in a paper gown that didn't close in the back.

"I can't let you go under without a song," he said. "It's bad luck."

"Dermot, no," said Donovan.

Dermot sang the first line of "Happy Birthday" in a deep wavering baritone, off key on every note.

I laughed, and the laugh hurt my chest, and I laughed anyway.

"Out," the surgeon said.

Dermot went, still singing.

I could hear him halfway down the hall.

The room was quiet after that.

Donovan was standing at the foot of the table, in a gown too, with his sleeves pushed up and the tattoos black against his forearms.

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