The moment we arrived, a wave of uncertainty hit me.
“This is going to cast a pall on the night,” I admitted.
“It is,” she confirmed. “But it’s going to be even harder if they’re hit with this out of the blue. For some reason the gym likes you.”
I shot her a look. “You like me.”
She rolled her eyes. “No. I love you. They like you.”
I felt my heart squeeze.
I couldn’t stop myself from catching her by the ponytail and pulling her in for a kiss.
“No more of that!” Taos wrapped his knuckles on the car window. “We have things to do.”
I rolled my eyes after removing my lips from hers. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
Thirty minutes later, the entire table was silent.
“Fuck,” Jasper said. “I knew when I saw you that something was wrong. But something wrong to me in my head, and the something really wrong with you, are way different. Shit, man. I’m sorry.”
“I’m assuming with the oxygen you’re carrying around, as well as the edema and lack of sleeping you were talking about, you’re in the end stages,” Soren, the ER doctor, said.
I shrugged. “That’s what they say.”
“Do they have any idea about the transplant list? Are they just going to leave you in the dark about it? Like do they just call you and say, ‘Oh, hey, we got you a heart?’ Or do they have any idea…” Sophia trailed off, not sure what she was trying to say.
“From what I understand, there are a lot of factors that go into who gets a heart,” I admitted.
“There is,” Soren agreed as he tried to explain. “First, someone has to die that is a match for what Murphy would need. Geographically, that person has to die somewhere close so that the heart can get to him in time. Murphy also has to be able to show he’s able to get there to give the heart to him. He has to be healthy enough to receive the heart. Because if there is even a slight chance that the heart won’t work or be compatible with him, they’re going to give that heart to someone that they know will be able to use it.”
I listened with a dawning sense of horror.
Not because of what Soren was saying, but because of what Mavis was listening to.
I’d watched these past few weeks as any and all hope that she’d been carrying around had slowly dwindled over time. But I watched right that moment as the last remaining hope that Mavis had for me bled out right before my eyes.
I moved until I was practically plastered against her side, and then wrapped my arm around her shoulders.
Vlad, who was in the baby seat between us, leaned into not me, but his mother.
He must’ve sensed her mood right along with me.
Fran looked at her sister with a look of sadness on her face that likely reflected my own.
God, if I could just make one thing happen, one very small thing, it would be to erase my entire existence from Mavis’s life.
I wish I hadn’t hurt her like I had.
I wish…
“I think we should figure out what we’re going to do to make sure you can pay for this,” Jasper suggested.
That’s when I started to crack up. “I got it covered.”
“Listen, man.” Jasper leaned back into his seat, his large shoulder bumping his father’s similar large shoulder. “I can work it out with the station. We can put on a fundraiser. Not to mention we could hold a competition at the gym that could raise some. We can totally make this work.”
That’s when Mavis cracked her first grin of the night.
“Jazz, honey.” Mavis grinned wickedly as she reached for a roll to tear into pieces for her son. “It’s sweet that you’re the only non-nosey person at the gym, but Murphy is a millionaire. He won the lottery a few years ago, and has enough money to buy all of Paris.”
Jasper’s eyes went wide. “No shit?”
“No shit,” I confirmed. “I won the lottery about two years ago. Which is a far cry from where I was.”
“That fuckin’ sucks that you won the lottery and you can’t even spend it,” Fran frowned.
“Fran!” Taos elbowed his soon-to-be wife. “You can’t say that.”
I chuckled then, slightly breathless as I did. “It’s actually kind of refreshing, honestly. To be one hundred percent honest, it’s fuckin’ awful timing. If this had happened when my mom and I were struggling, I wouldn’t even need the heart surgery.”
Soren frowned. “What happened? I just assumed you were born with a heart anomaly.”
“Nope.” I shook my head as I caught a piece of Mavis’s hair and twirled it around my big finger. “Sadly, that’s not what happened. I caused this.”
“You did not cause this,” Mavis snapped.
Vlad looked at her, and like the good kid he was, offered her a bite of roll.