Chapter 13: Hate

"Three weeks," I said, and the lobby floor stayed solid under me.

"I'm not calling to pressure you," the doctor said. "I'm the one who signs the date on her chart."

"Then you've done it."

"I have. I won't call again unless the number changes."

I hung up, and Anson pushed open the lobby doors.

A wall of phones rose on the other side.

"Wynne, will you let your sister die?" a reporter shouted.

"How does it feel to be the reason?" shouted another.

A woman in a camel coat stepped out of the crowd and stood too close.

"She is twenty-six years old," she said. "You have a spare, and you're wearing a sweater."

"It isn't a spare," I said.

"Some sister."

Anson put his body between us, and I stepped around him.

I answered the woman, because she had asked a real question. "I am not the spare, ma'am."

She turned away with her mouth tight, and the phones followed her instead of me.

By noon my name was the top of every list I could see.

THE SISTER WHO SAID NO, said a tabloid on a newsstand.

Online it was worse. A thousand strangers had decided I took the microphone for money.

One wrote that I should be made to answer to a dying girl's face.

I read forty comments standing in the elevator, and then Anson took the phone out of my hand.

"They are strangers," he said.

"They are strangers who got it from my mother."

"Yes. And at two o'clock your father speaks to his staff, in the atrium of the Grand."

"How do you know?"

"I wrote the agenda." His face was calm. "The board met at eleven. I'd like you to watch."

At two the atrium of the Sedgwick Grand was full of staff in uniform.

I stood at the back by the coat check with my hood up.

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