This was true enough. Working from home with a toddler underfoot was a game of strategy, but in relinquishing every other weekend and stray weeknights to Doug, she wasn’t about to rely on childcare more than absolutely necessary. So she made the most of nap times and playground benches, and her clients grew accustomed to emails time-stamped at all hours. She tried to think of sleepless nights as “found time.”
Sometimes it even worked.
“New clients are good.” His relief at having something positive to say was palpable.
“You bet.”
Doug straightened and jammed his hands into the pockets of the baggy sweatpants he favored for workouts, and Oscar buried his nose in the grass, resuming his investigation of every animal that had touched his territory overnight. “Did you send it?” His face strained with the effort of bracing for another argument, and she wished the tension were enough to make him look like someone other than himself. Like the Doug she’d lost wasn’t the same version she’d loved. “The email, I mean.”
“I did.” She hadn’t needed his nudge—she’d known she needed to do it—but their last blowup was bad enough to give her the push.
“You did?” A nervous laugh escaped him. “Good! I mean, good for you. When did—Have you heard back?”
“Not yet. I expect it might take her a few days. To process.”
“Sure.” He scuffled his feet. “How much did you give her to process?”
As if Sela didn’t have the sense not to scare off someone she’d been reticent to contact in the first place.
“I only introduced myself. But even that is a lot.”
He ran a hand through his hair. It needed a cut. “Good,” he said again. “I, uh. I went to that seminar they recommended. The Big Ask: The Big Give? Really helpful. You should definitely sign up for one, once you’re looking at broaching the subject with her.”
Sela tried to smile. In the whirlwind years since her chronic kidney disease diagnosis, she’d managed to wrap her brain around a lot of unavoidable realities. The careful tally of every nutrient that went in or out of her system. The inconvenience of monthly blood draws and the mounting disappointment of their outcomes. The head-up determination to maintain a quality of life as close to normal as possible, to give Brody a childhood as normal as possible. But the idea of being coached on how to ask someone to consider giving you a piece of their body was not yet in her comfort zone. Ironic her husband had been unable to cope with so much of the rest—to let go of the idea that things could ever go back to the way they were—and yet had made up his mind to earn extra credit on this of all subjects.
“I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume they don’t role-play my particular scenario.” There was how to ask family for a kidney and how to ask strangers for a kidney. But her situation was …
Well, it was both, while managing to feel like neither. And though she was no opportunist, she hadn’t worked out yet how to come across as anything but.
He gave her a look that said, in no uncertain terms, rehashing this would not be helpful. “What they do is raise your comfort level with the topic. Have you watched their videos online?”
She looked away. Too bad she couldn’t come out and ask him for the kind of advice she’d actually find useful. Like how he managed to avoid exhausting himself with this worried energy that constantly depleted her.
“I know you chose to tune out social media…” He was selecting his words carefully, as they’d butted heads over this, too. Doug had accused her of doing what he’d been warned about, isolating herself, retreating, when she’d wanted only to maintain her sanity, to block out the toxicity inherent online, and yes, to avoid the barrage of well-meaning inquiries about her nothing-good-to-report health. But in Doug’s newly hypervigilant eyes, she’d been morphing from his individually human wife into a case study who refused to behave by the book. He took her noncompliance as a personal affront in a way she didn’t grasp until too late. “But you should know I posted my Big Ask on my accounts, on your behalf.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. She should be grateful, probably, that he was willing to swallow her pride and do the thing she could not yet do. But she could practically see his friends rubbernecking at how desperate her situation had grown and what a stand-up guy he was to try to help. “The seminar says the more people who see or hear the request, the better,” he went on. “Even acquaintances, friends of friends. You never know.”
“But Doug, you know finding a nonrelative match in my case is super unlikely—”
“Of course I know that.” He’d sat through the lesson on her antibodies, too. Highly sensitized, they called her. In fact, even if they found a live donor candidate, she’d almost certainly have to undergo something called a desensitization process to lower her body’s defenses before being green-lighted for the transplant. “But it’s even more unlikely if you don’t try.” This was why he’d been on her to send that email in the first place. Her mother would turn in her grave if she knew about this: that Sela had, if the DNA ancestry test could be believed, located her father’s family via a half sister—something her one and only parent had expressly forbidden her from attempting. People didn’t come much more understanding or nonvindictive than her mother, so Sela trusted that she’d had good reason—that whatever was on the other end of her parentage would be explored at her own peril.
Doug insisted that had her mother foreseen these circumstances, she’d have felt differently—anything to give Sela a fighting chance. At the time of her mother’s death, they’d had a slim, if fading, hope that Sela’s kidneys might plateau at a reduced but livable level. When they didn’t, it became hard to argue with the facts: That a transplant was highly preferable to dialysis at her age especially—and the slow crawl of bureaucracy required she be proactive about her options well in advance. That even now that she’d initiated the process of getting on the transplant list, it could take a year just for approval to officially start waiting. That a living donation would extend her life years longer than an organ donated in death.
That no one on her mother’s side was a match.
Nor was Doug, who turned out to be disqualified regardless thanks to—of all things—growth hormones he’d briefly taken as a cocksure underclassman trying to make varsity. It would have been almost funny, had it not solidified his new stance that no misstep was innocent enough to be laughed off.
Besides. Sela had ordered the DNA test: Deep down, she must have come to terms, let herself hope it wasn’t a lark. Although …
If this were just about a kidney, she’d never have reached out. With her mother dead and Doug gone, Sela’s world had shrunk to a perfect triangle: Brody, her work, and her illness. An unnaturally rigid shape for a life, which was meant to be soft, bendable. Expandable.
That there might be a half sibling somewhere outside those points was the real temptation. Depending on whom she was talking to, the possibility that the half sister might also be a pathway to a one-day donor was either a cover story or an icing-on-the-cake scenario.
But at both ends of the spectrum, this feeling applied exclusively to the mysterious Caroline Porter. Had Sela found her father, she’d have rather died, honestly, than combine his flesh with hers. He was likely either too old or too unfit to donate, anyway—assuming he was about her mother’s age, most people had by then lost the impeccable health required. But a sibling …