They Gave My Heart to My Sister and Forgot My Last Birthday novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Hair

"Was," I said.

I held onto the doorframe.

"She died on the twentieth," Donovan said. "The night before your birthday. A truck ran a red light on Route 1A."

I sat down on the arm of the nearest chair, because my knees decided it for me.

"She was twenty-two," he said. "She had a gap in her teeth and she hated being told what to do. You'd have liked her."

"I did like her."

"I know."

"She sat next to me for six months and she never told me she had a brother."

"She told me about you every Thursday night." Donovan pulled a hand down over his face. "She knew who you were. She picked the chair beside you anyway."

"Why would she do that?"

"She said it was the one room in Boston where nobody asked what family she was."

I looked down at the blue wool on my wrist.

"I wasn't going to ask," I said.

"That's why."

I cried then.

I hadn't done it in front of my parents, or at the nurses' station, or in the car.

I did it in a stranger's study with a pump humming on my shoulder, and Donovan didn't say anything stupid.

He pushed a box of tissues across the desk and let me get through it.

When I looked up he had turned his chair to the window so that I wouldn't have to be watched.

"She stopped coming in August," I said, when I could.

"The first week of August, after the safe." His voice was even. "She said she couldn't sit beside you and know what my men had done to your house."

"It wasn't your men's doing. Somebody sold you the sheet."

"No. It was ours. I gave the order." He turned back. "I'm not going to tell you it was anybody else's."

It was an odd thing to be grateful for, and I was.

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