Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
"—one more question, if you'll indulge us. You're famously private. Any regrets you'd share?"
He's quiet for a second. I know that second. I've watched him hold a hundred words behind his teeth in that exact second.
"One," he answers.
"Just one?"
"One that matters." He looks straight down the barrel of the camera, and I swear the man is looking at me, all the way across the country, through a muted TV in a room he'll never see. "There was someone who deserved my gratitude. The deepest gratitude I've ever owed anyone. And instead of giving it to her, I made her feel like she owed me for existing." His jaw works. "She's gone now. That's mine to live with. But if she ever hears this...she was never the debt. She was the gift. I had that exactly backwards, and it cost me the only thing I've ever been afraid to lose."
The host says something. I don't hear it.
My hand's gone up over my mouth without checking with me first. There's a paper cup of somebody's coffee going cold in the other one and I've got no memory of picking it up. I sit in a green room three thousand miles from him and watch the most guarded man I've ever known apologize to me on national television without ever once saying my name, and I think, clear as anything, you stubborn, impossible man. You waited until I couldn't answer you to finally say it out loud. And the worst part, the part that undoes me right there under the fluorescent lights, is that a year of fine comes apart all at once, and I understand that I never stopped. Not for one day. Not for one beat of a heart I was never even supposed to have.
Chapter Thirty-Five
THEY CALL MY NAME, and the world goes to static.
I don't remember standing, or the stairs, or the statue, heavier than it has any right to be, or the wall of light where a thousand faces should be. I remember gripping the podium like it's the only solid thing left on earth, and I remember promising myself that if this impossible thing ever happened, I'd say the one true thing and nothing else.
"I wasn't supposed to be here," I tell the room.
It goes quiet.
"I don't mean that in the cute way. I mean I have somebody else's heart. Two years ago a girl I never got to meet died, and she was young, and she was loved, and some part of her decided that a total stranger should get to keep going." My voice wobbles. I let it. "So I don't really get to take credit for a single beat of what's standing up here. Everything I am, everything I get to become, I'm borrowing from a girl who ran out of time to become it herself."
Somewhere in all that light, a person I can't see makes a sound I feel more than hear.
"I know your name now," I say to her, only to her, to the heart doing its brave work behind my ribs. "And I'm going to spend the rest of the life you gave me trying to be worth it. Thank you. Thank you for the extra time. I promise I won't waste a beat of it."
I don't thank anyone else. There are people you thank at a podium and people you carry off the stage, and the one I'd have thanked most, once, is a wound I don't get to name out loud.
But as they walk me into the wings, blinking, shaking, clutching my little gold proof that a broke girl with a borrowed heart made good, I finally find the one who made that sound.
Third row. Aisle seat. A man in a perfect suit, one hand pressed hard over his mouth, holding himself together by sheer will. The most controlled face I've ever loved is coming apart behind that hand. Not crying. Men like him don't get to. Just wrecked, silent, for his sister, and for me, and for the two of us he broke.
And nobody else in that whole bright theater has the first idea that they're watching a single heart get handed, gently, back and forth between the only three people it ever belonged to.
Chapter Thirty-Six
HE'S AT THE STAGE DOOR on opening night, and I walk right past him.
I've earned a play, somehow. A real one, a black-box theater with good bones and eight shows a week and my name down in the program, and every single night when I come out the back into the alley, he's there.
He never rushes me, never grabs my arm or steps into my path or does one single thing I could hold against him. He just stands across the alley in the cold with his hands in his pockets, and he says my name, once, like a question, and I get into my cab like the question was in a language I don't speak.