His Billion-Dollar Test Killed Me

1 When Gavin called to complain about the nausea from his latest round of chemotherapy, I was standing on an overturned wooden milk crate, looping a yellow nylon rope over the exposed cast-iron pipe that ran across our ceiling. Hearing his voice through the speaker, cracked and trembling with practiced exhaustion, tore something open behind my ribs. The tears came fast and hot, blurring the peeling wallpaper of our drafty third-floor walk-up. I swallowed hard, forcing my vocal cords into something resembling steady. With numb, calloused fingers, I pulled the knot tight into a hangman’s loop. ""Gav,"" I said, keeping the sob trapped in my throat. ""I got the money. The full three hundred thousand for the resection surgery. You can go in tomorrow morning. You’re going to be okay."" There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line, followed by the wet sound of sniffling. ""Where did you get that kind of cash, Nora?"" His voice broke with theatrical tenderness. ""Did you take on another graveyard shift behind my back? Nora, please. You don’t have to kill yourself for me. Just wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow, I have a surprise for you. Everything is going to change."" I closed my eyes, let out a small, broken laugh, and whispered, ""Okay."" Then I kicked the crate away. The sudden drop snapped the world into violent focus. The pocket of my oversized thrift-store denim jacket turned inside out as I kicked, and a folded, grease-stained contract fluttered to the water-damaged linoleum floor. It was a hard-money loan agreement with an offshore predatory syndicate. Gavin didn’t know. He had no idea that while he was supposedly fighting end-stage liver cancer, I had been diagnosed with gastric cancer. Early stage. Treatable, if caught in time. But in the world we lived in—the world of two penniless kids from the wrong side of the tracks, drowning in unpaid medical bills and eviction notices—there was only enough money, only enough life, to save one of us. I gave him the lifeboat. I signed the predatory note with my own name and forged no co-signers. Once the coroner signed my death certificate, the collectors would hit a legal dead end. They couldn't squeeze blood from an empty grave. He would be clean. He would live. The rope dug into my windpipe, crushing cartilage and carotid arteries. My vision flared into blinding white sparks. And then, from the cracked screen of my phone lying face-up on the floor three feet below my swinging sneakers, a burst of boisterous laughter echoed through the tiny room. ""Holy shit, man! She really came through?"" It was Nate’s voice, unmistakable and smug, cutting through the background noise of what sounded like a private lounge. ""Three hundred grand in cash! Dude, she’s the real deal. Most girls bolt the second a guy gets sick, but she spent three years working herself to the bone like an obedient dog."" A low, relaxed chuckle came through the speaker. It was Gavin. Strong. Resonant. Not a single trace of the breathless wheeze he had used on me thirty seconds earlier. ""You really took this broke-cancer-patient bit to the extreme, Gav,"" another friend chimed in, the clinking of crystal whiskey tumblers sharp and clear. ""Does she still think you’re an orphan working off an expired student visa? Does she have any clue you’re the sole heir to Montgomery Global?"" ""I had to be certain,"" Gavin said smoothly. I heard the rustle of tailored wool as he stood up, the lazy confidence in his posture almost visible through the airwaves. ""I had to know she loved me for who I am, not the Montgomery trust fund. She passed the test. Tomorrow, I’m giving her the most lavish wedding this city has ever seen."" My soul froze before my heart even stopped beating. My love. My sacrifice. My three years of slow, agonizing self-immolation. He hadn't just taken it. He had manufactured it. The oxygen in my lungs vanished. Instinct took over; my body thrashed against the nylon noose, heels slamming into the rickety folding table beside me. The small spiral notebook I used to track every single penny crashed to the floor. On today’s page, I had written only four words: Breakfast: $0.50 (stale bagel). And then, before tying the rope, I had drawn a thick black line through it. I was going to die anyway; spending fifty cents on stale carbs was an unforgivable indulgence. That fifty cents was meant to go toward Gavin’s post-op ice chips and electrolyte water. ""Hey, Gav, is that the twenty-carat unheated Ceylon sapphire from the Christie’s auction?"" Nate whistled over the line. ""You’re actually putting that on her finger tomorrow?"" ""She loves blue,"" Gavin said, his voice dripping with triumphant affection. ""I had my scouts track it down in Geneva six months ago. My girl deserves the best the world has to offer."" His girl. His girl was currently swinging in the dark, her empty stomach convulsing with violent, dry heaves, her brain starving for air. Gavin Montgomery. When you were supposedly diagnosed three years ago, I couldn't bear to watch you try to work through the pain. I had a 4.0 GPA at the university. I was on track for an honors fellowship. I dropped out the next morning. For three years, I slept four hours a night on a lumpy pull-out sofa. I worked five jobs: running industrial dishwashers at dawn, cleaning motel bathrooms at noon, packing warehouse crates at dusk, and delivering takeout on a rattling moped through freezing winter blizzards until two in the morning. My knuckles cracked and bled in the frostbite winds. I never complained. I never shed a single tear in front of you. The only times I wept were in the dead of night, looking at your pale face and shaved head, terrified that the universe was going to take you away from me. And it was all theater. You never had cancer. You never took targeted therapy. You never sat under an IV drip while toxic poisons pumped into your veins. It was an audition. A sick, sadistic loyalty test conceived by a bored billionaire. Gav... I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear the phone from the floor and curse his bloodline into the dirt. But the dark closed in. The pressure behind my eyes snapped. My body stopped kicking. When my consciousness flickered back, I wasn't in the walk-up anymore. I was weightless, floating like cold mist beside Gavin. He was standing in the private penthouse suite of an uptown athletic club, holding a cheap red-and-gold embroidered prayer talisman in his manicured hand—the one I had obtained for him years ago, walking miles up a gravel path to a mountain chapel in the freezing rain to have a priest bless it. He looked up at Talia Brooks, who was leaning against the mahogany bar with her arms crossed over a tailored silk blazer. ""I won the bet, Talia,"" Gavin said, a smirk playing on his lips. ""Nora isn't an opportunist. She isn't a gold-digger."" Talia scoffed, swirling the amber liquid in her glass. ""The target we set was three hundred thousand dollars, Gavin. She’s an uneducated dropout from a dead-end town. How does a girl like that pull three hundred grand out of thin air in forty-eight hours? She comes creeping back to that rat hole at two in the morning every night. For all you know, she’s turning tricks in the back of town cars."" My phantom chest burned with a furious, useless fire. On those midnight streets, I had hauled bags of quick-drying cement for roadside repair crews. I had scrubbed grease traps. I had taken extra routes in neighborhoods where the streetlights were shot out. But I had never once accepted a room key, never once taken the money offered by men who saw my desperation and tried to buy my dignity. Gavin, how can you stand there and let her poison your mouth? Do you know that for three years, I didn't even buy bottled water when my lips were split and bleeding from dehydration? I drank straight from public restroom faucets. I starved myself so you could have experimental clinical trials. And to you, that money was just an arbitrary number Talia pulled out of her head. Gavin’s smile faded. His jaw tightened. ""Nora is going to be my wife. Watch your mouth, Talia."" Nate stepped between them, laughing defensively. ""Easy, man. Talia’s just looking out for you. We grew up in the same sandbox; you can’t get genuinely pissed at her over a bet."" ""I don't argue with single people,"" Gavin said coolly, tossing his car keys in the air and catching them. ""I’m going home to spoil my future bride."" He walked down to the private garage, slid into the leather seat of a customized black SUV, and flipped down the vanity mirror. He pulled out a professional makeup kit—the kind used on movie sets. With practiced, surgical precision, he began applying grey-tinted cream beneath his cheekbones, hollowing out his temples, dusting a translucent matte powder over his lips until they looked cracked and chalky. In less than twenty minutes, he had transformed into the phantom I had spent three years grieving over: a dying young man hanging on by a thread. Just as he reached for the ignition, Talia tapped a manicured fingernail against the driver’s side glass. When he rolled it down, she dropped a manila envelope into his lap. ""She sold her mother’s cottage in Ohio for a hundred and fifty grand,"" Talia said, her voice dripping with venomous amusement. ""Where did the other hundred and fifty come from, Gavin?"" The contents of the envelope spilled across the center console. Photographs. Dozens of them. Me standing next to the gruff warehouse foreman as he handed me my cash envelope. Me sitting on the hood of an old pickup truck, sharing a thermos of coffee with a fifty-year-old construction laborer during a midnight shift. Me taking a stack of twenties from the owner of an all-night diner. Gavin’s grip on the steering wheel tightened until his knuckles turned white. ""She didn't just play the martyr,"" Talia sneered. ""She found other ways to get funded."" ""I know my girl,"" Gavin said, his voice dropping an octave, lethal and cold. He slammed the SUV into reverse, the tires screeching against the polished concrete, missing Talia’s designer heels by inches. ""If you ever fabricate garbage to slander her again, Talia, we’re done. In business and in blood."" He tore out of the garage and sped across the city, pulling up outside an artisanal bakery in the West Village. Strawberry shortcake. It was my absolute favorite. Before his ""illness,"" we had split a small slice on my twenty-first birthday in a dingy diner. But from the day he told me his liver was failing, I hadn't touched a single dessert. Sugar was a luxury for people who had a future. Gavin stepped up to the counter, his gaunt stage makeup drawing sympathetic looks from the staff. ""I need your whole strawberry cream cake."" The baker looked apologetic. ""I'm so sorry, sir. Our last strawberry shortcake was just picked up for a catering order."" Gavin’s brow furrowed. His immediate instinct was to call his concierge and have someone buy out an entire patisserie in Midtown. But then he stopped himself. He smiled softly. She’s gone three years without it, he thought. One more night won't hurt. ""Tomorrow,"" he murmured to himself, turning back toward the street. ""Tomorrow, after we sign the registry, I’ll hire a pastry chef from Paris. She’ll have fresh berries flown in every morning. Anything she wants, I’ll hand it to her on a silver platter."" He drove to the east side of town, parking the luxury vehicle two blocks away so I wouldn't see it from the window, and walked up to our tenement. It was a decaying pre-war building with exposed wiring and water damage. The rent was cheap because three years ago, a tenant had committed suicide inside our very unit. On the third-floor landing, the neighbor, Mrs. Higgins, was putting out her trash. She saw Gavin—pale, sunken-eyed, dragging his feet up the stairs—and sighed with deep, maternal sympathy. ""Oh, Gavin, sweetheart. You’re back from the clinic? Nora told me to tell you to just rest easy at the hospital for your operation tomorrow. She said she paid the full deposit."" Gavin gave her a weak, grateful smile. In his mind, he was already playing out the morning: Nora would wake up expecting an ambulance to take him to hospice or surgery, but instead, a motorcade of Maybachs would line the narrow street. A bespoke lace gown, hand-stitched by a master atelier in Paris, would be brought up these miserable stairs. And the cottage in Ohio? He had already bought it back through a shell company. It was fully renovated, deeded under her name, waiting to be presented as a wedding gift. She would cry, of course. She would beat his chest and call him an asshole for lying to her. But then he would pull her into his arms, slip the twenty-carat sapphire onto her finger, and erase every hardship she had ever known. I watched him from above, the agony of my spirit suffocating in the stagnant hallway air. I remembered last week. The private specialist Gavin claimed to be seeing had sent a final notice: Three hundred thousand dollars by Friday, or we release his surgical slot to the next patient on the waiting list. An impossible ransom. I sold my mother’s house for pennies on the dollar to a quick-cash wholesale buyer. I worked until my vision blurred. Two nights ago, while hauling heavy crates of frozen poultry at the meatpacking plant, hot blood had suddenly surged up my throat and spilled past my lips. The floor manager, terrified of an OSHA violation, dragged me to the public emergency room. The doctor ran a rapid blood panel and an emergency endoscopy. Gastric adenocarcinoma. Stage one. Highly treatable with localized resection and mild chemo. The manager didn't care about the prognosis. He paid me my remaining shift wages in crumpled cash and told me never to come back. He couldn't risk a liability claim. I sat on the cold plastic bench in that fluorescent-lit hallway, surrounded by the true horrors of the uninsured: a young daughter wailing as her mother was denied an experimental trial; an old veteran staring blankly at a denial letter from his supplemental coverage. I held my biopsy report, my thumb tracing the diagnosis, and did the math. Gavin’s chemo was ten thousand dollars a cycle. His targeted therapies were eight thousand a month. If I started treatment, I would be too sick to carry drywall, too weak to deliver food. The income stream would dry up instantly. Both of us would drown. I tore the medical report into tiny pieces and flushed them down the hospital toilet. Then I took out my phone and recorded a voice memo: ""Gav... I really, really want a slice of strawberry cake tonight..."" Before the upload finished, I panicked. An artisanal slice was eight dollars. Eight dollars was half a bottle of prescription anti-nausea meds for his liver. I deleted the memo. Instead, I wiped my bloodstained chin with a coarse paper towel, pulled my mouth into a bright, wide smile, and initiated a video call. ""Gav! Never mind the cake! We’re going to beat this first. Once you have your surgery and get clean scans, I’m going to eat strawberry shortcake every single day of my life!"" He had laughed through the screen. ""Deal, sweetheart."" Now, Gavin unlocked the peeling door to apartment 3B. ""Nora?"" he called softly, pushing the door inward. ""I didn't tell you, but I hired pastry chefs from three different countries. You can have whatever flavor you want for the rest of your life."" His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, frowning when he realized our voice call from twenty minutes ago was still connected. ""Nora?"" he whispered into the receiver. ""You there?"" Nothing. Only the faint, ambient hum of an empty room. He let out a fond, exasperated chuckle. ""Off to another shift already... God, you stubborn girl. Let me hang up before you throw a fit about your phone bill running over the family plan limits."" Before his thumb could hit the red button, an incoming call overrode the screen. Talia’s personalized ringtone blasted through the hallway. Gavin answered. ""Talia, I told you—"" ""Gavin!"" Talia’s voice came through, breathless, hysterical, punctuated by sharp gasps. ""Someone’s following me... There’s a guy in a dark hoodie tracking me down the parking garage... Gavin, I’m terrified!"" Gavin froze, the hand pushing open our apartment door stopping dead in its tracks. ""Stay in your car,"" he commanded, his protective instincts instantly flaring. ""Lock the doors. I’m coming."" He turned back toward Mrs. Higgins, pulling a thick roll of hundred-dollar bills from his tailored pocket and shoving ten of them into her weathered hands. ""Keep an eye on the door,"" Gavin said briskly. ""When Nora gets back from her shift, text me immediately."" Mrs. Higgins stared down at the crisp stack of cash, her mouth falling open. ""Gavin... if you have this kind of money, why on earth are you letting that poor girl kill herself out there? She comes in at three in the morning looking like a ghost. One of these nights, some lunatic on the street is going to—"" ""I know, I know,"" Gavin interrupted, already taking the stairs two at a time, keys jingling in his hand. ""Tomorrow I’m marrying her, Mrs. Higgins. She’s never going to work another second of her life."" I looked down at my translucent, spectral hands. They were covered in thick, rough calluses, the fingernails chipped and blackened from grease and manual labor. A thousand dollars. To earn a thousand dollars, I had to wash three thousand plates, carry two hundred sacks of gravel, and dodge drunk drivers in the sleet for an entire month. To him, it was pocket change thrown at an old woman to buy five minutes of convenience. Yesterday on that hospital roof, the wind had been freezing. I had climbed up to the ledge, staring down at the concrete alley below, wondering if jumping would be faster. But I was terrified of leaving a mess, terrified that the city would charge Gavin an impound fee for my body. So I walked down. My phone alarm had buzzed: 6:00 AM: Haul drywall at the commercial site, collect final day-labor cash. 9:00 AM: Food delivery on the moped, beg the shift lead to advance my tips. I deposited every single cent into Gavin’s account. At 1:00 AM last night, on my final delivery run, a man in a hooded jacket really had followed me down an unlit alley. My hand had hovered over the speed dial to call Gavin, but I forced my thumb away. He’s resting. He’s fighting cancer. You cannot stress his heart. I revved the dying engine of my scooter to get away, hit a patch of black ice, and slammed hard into an abandoned brick foundation. The metal handlebars crushed my knee; my empty stomach cramped so violently I choked on bile. I lay in the freezing mud, clutching my mouth with both hands, refusing to make a sound. Don't cry, I told myself. Gavin is getting his surgery tomorrow. Tomorrow, he gets to live. Smile, Nora. You did it. ""Gavin, look! Does it look good on me?"" Talia’s voice shattered my memory. We were no longer in the tenement hallway. Gavin’s car had screeched to a halt outside an exclusive bridal salon on Madison Avenue. Inside, under warm crystal chandeliers, Talia was twirling in front of a three-sided mirror, her body wrapped in an ivory tulle gown encrusted with thousands of microscopic diamonds. She held a bouquet of white peonies, laughing. ""And you swore you didn't have feelings for me! You ordered this custom gown, and it fits my measurements down to the millimeter!"" Gavin stepped inside, looking around at the empty boutique. There was no stalker. No danger. Just Talia, radiant and triumphant. A weary, affectionate smile touched his lips. ""You pulled the fake-emergency card again? You’ve been doing this since prep school, Talia. Aren't you tired of playing that game?"" Talia glided over, linking her bare arm through his. ""I want to play it with you for the rest of our lives."" Gavin casually, almost instinctively, patted the top of her head—a gesture of lifelong familiarity—before pulling his arm away. ""Enough, Talia. Take it off. Nora is wearing it tomorrow."" Talia’s smile froze. Gavin turned to the head seamstress, gesturing with his hands. ""Nora’s waist was this size six months ago, but she’s lost a lot of weight recently. I need you to take the bodice in at least two inches. Make sure the inner lining is soft silk; her skin gets irritated easily."" He pulled out his phone and sent me a text: [Nora, my surgery is scheduled for early tomorrow. Don't go to work tonight. Stay home and rest. Tomorrow morning, I have the biggest surprise of your life.] He brought up the photo of the restored deed to my mother’s house, hovered over the send button, and then deleted it. ""No,"" he muttered with a grin. ""I want to see her face when I hand it to her in person."" He glanced back at Talia, who was still standing in the dress, her eyes dark with resentment. ""Why haven't you changed yet?"" Nate lounged on an ottoman nearby, sipping champagne. ""Come on, Gav, let her wear it for a minute. You two were practically betrothed in the cradle. When we were eight, you played her groom in the country club playhouse!"" Nate chuckled, nudging another friend. ""In our tax bracket, everybody keeps an official wife for the press and a sidepiece for the Hamptons. Who says you can’t have—"" ""I only want Nora,"" Gavin cut him off, his voice flat and unyielding. ""Three years ago, you all insisted Nora was a gold-digger. Talia swore she’d only release me from our families' arrangement if I put Nora through the wringer. I agreed to your stupid test. The test is over. She bled for me. Tomorrow, she is Mrs. Montgomery. Every single one of you will treat her with the respect she earned."" ""Fine, fine,"" Nate raised his hands in mock surrender. ""Gavin’s head over heels. We get it."" Two attendants helped Talia unzip the heavy gown. Gavin walked over to the head stylist, handing her a folder. ""Here is her photo. She prefers understated, clean makeup. Nothing heavy. Tomorrow morning, wait for my signal outside her building. When I give the word, you go up, do her hair, and help her into the dress."" The stylist took the photograph. But the moment her eyes locked onto my face, her expression soured into utter disgust. ""Her?"" the stylist blurted out, her voice sharp with disbelief. She pulled her own phone from her apron pocket, swiped through her gallery, and shoved a screen into Gavin’s face. ""Mr. Montgomery, you’re being played for a fool! This girl works out of the industrial motels on Route 4. She’s an escort. My husband was on her client roster last month!"" On the screen was an image of me—or rather, a crude composite of my face cropped onto an escort advertisement, dressed in cheap lingerie, with bold text stamped across the chest: $500/hr. Full Service. Gavin stopped breathing. He stared at the screen, the silence in the boutique turning thick and suffocating. I watched the machinery of his mind turn, watching the venom seep into his memories. He was remembering the nights he waited on our lumpy sofa, pretending to be asleep when I finally unlocked the door at 2:30 AM. He was remembering the bruises on my inner arms—bruises from carrying heavy metal scaffolding. And most of all, he was remembering eleven months ago. The miscarriage. It was the only time Gavin had ever screamed at me. He had lost his mind, slamming doors, his face purple with rage: ""Nora, that was our child! A human life! Are you really that shallow? Because I'm sick? Because you think a broke, dying invalid doesn't deserve to have a family with you?"" I had bitten my lip until it bled, offering no defense. He didn't know that when the pharmacy pregnancy test showed two pink lines, I had collapsed to the bathroom floor, weeping tears of pure, desperate joy. A baby. A piece of him that would survive if the cancer took him. But the clinical pharmacist had shattered me. ""Miss, your partner is on high-dose experimental alkylating agents and targeted radiation? If he conceived while on those regimens, the risk of catastrophic genetic deformities and non-viable organ development is nearly one hundred percent. And if you’re carrying, you can’t work twelve-hour shifts."" I didn't have money for prenatal vitamins, let alone pediatric intensive care. Every cent I had was earmarked for his next round of infusions. And that same afternoon, the broker from the black-market organ syndicate had sent a secure message to my burner phone: [We have an emergency match for your kidney. Be at the private clinic in Newark tomorrow at 8:00 AM. Fifty thousand dollars cash upon completion.] I had curled on our sagging mattress that night, feeling the cramping begin as the clinic pills took effect, feeling our baby slip away from me in the dark. I'm sorry, I had whispered to my empty womb. Mommy can't afford to keep you, because Mommy has to buy Daddy's life. And to buy his life, I have to give away part of my body tomorrow. Forgive me. Gavin had found the empty test box three days later. He screamed. He packed a bag and disappeared for an entire month. I had no time to grieve, no time to rest my stitched-up flank. With one kidney gone, my body ran on fumes. I spent my lunch breaks calling his phone forty times in a row, leaving tearful apologies at red lights while delivering food, nearly getting crushed by an eighteen-wheeler because my vision swam with fever. I never told him. Just as he never told me that he was the sole heir to a fortune, that he had never received a drop of chemo, that he was perfectly, flawlessly healthy. If he had told the truth, I could have finished my degree. I could have had my baby. I could have had a life. ""Take that down,"" Gavin said, his voice terrifyingly quiet. Talia stepped out of the fitting room, a predatory grin on her lips as she snatched the stylist’s phone. ""Why are you getting defensive, Gavin? Look at her! She’s a streetwalker. God knows how many men she slept with to scrape together three hundred thousand dollars. And you’re standing here like an idiot, ready to put a family heirloom on her finger!"" Nate shook his head, laughing dryly. ""Cancel the wedding, Gav. Seriously. Send her a banner that says '$500 Special' and hang it outside her tenement. Let the whole city see what she is. Did you really think she was fit to step through the doors of Montgomery Hall?"" ""Shut your mouths!"" Gavin roared. His fist shot out, catching Nate squarely on the jaw. Nate stumbled back, crashing into a glass display pedestal, shattering it to pieces. Gavin’s eyes were bloodshot, his chest heaving like a wounded beast. ""If you hadn't forced this sick fucking game on me, would she ever have been pushed to that edge? Would she have had to sell herself if I hadn't pretended to be dying?"" Talia gasped, grabbing Nate’s arm. ""Are you insane, Gavin? You’re hitting your childhood friends over damaged goods?"" Her voice cut through the air, high and piercing. ""Five hundred a night, Gavin! How many beds did she have to warm to make three hundred thousand dollars?"" I didn't! My phantom hands clawed at Gavin’s lapels, but I slipped through him like morning vapor. Gavin, look at me! I never touched anyone! Every dollar was clean! Don't listen to her! Gavin didn't look at Talia. His gaze swept over the room, murderous and unhinged. ""If a single syllable of this leaves this room, I will ruin every company your families own. I swear to God."" He bolted out the door. His hands were shaking so violently he dropped his keys twice before managing to start the engine. ""Nora... Nora, wait for me,"" he muttered like a lunatic, redialing my number over and over, only to be met by the mechanical voice of the operator. He didn't want to wait for tomorrow. He had to see me now. He had to look into my eyes and hear me tell him it wasn't true. He blew through three red lights, his tires smoking as he took the turns. Yet, when he finally pulled up to the curb outside our decaying tenement, his boots hit the pavement and instantly froze. Terror washed over him. For three years, medical bills that were nothing more than rounding errors to his trust fund had hung over my head like guillotine blades. Had I really been driven into dark motel rooms just to keep him breathing? While he was sitting in climate-controlled suites playing video games to pass the time, had I been pinned under strangers? And yet, even in his guilt, a grotesque, narcissistic pride flickered in his gut: She loved me that much. She destroyed herself for me. He pulled out the blue velvet jewelry box, opening it to catch the light of the streetlamp. The sapphire burned with an icy, pristine fire. He dialed his private concierge. ""Get a strawberry shortcake from the finest bakery in the city and deliver it to apartment 3B immediately."" He had already drafted the script in his head: If Nora asked why he had lied about being sick, he would confront her about the escort ads. Once she broke down in tears of shame, he would pull her into his arms, forgive her, and tell her that none of it mattered anymore. He would wash her clean with his wealth. He would drop to one knee and offer her an empire. ""Nora, I love you,"" he whispered, steeling himself. He took the stairs two at a time, shoved his key into the lock, and threw open the door. The draft from the cracked window caught the hem of my faded floral dress, making my suspended legs sway gently in the dark. Beneath my hanging toes, the high-interest loan contract fluttered across the floorboards. And on the cracked screen of my phone, lying beside the overturned milk crate, a notification lit up the room: [Automated Alert: An emergency tissue match has been verified for your remaining kidney. Are you willing to donate? The private buyer is offering $60,000 cash. This is sufficient to cover your partner's post-operative recovery costs.]