Yours Truly (Part of Your World, #2)(31)

He shrugged again. “Well, ask her to be your girlfriend.”

I stared at him incredulously.

“Not for real. Ask her to help you out.”

When I didn’t reply, he leaned forward on the table. “Look, Briana is cool as hell. She’d probably do it. Especially if you’re her brother’s kidney donor—” He bounced his eyebrows and grinned.

I stared at him a second. “I was a match?”

He shook his head. “You didn’t just match. It was perfect—well, as perfect as it can get, outside of growing your own organs. I mean this kid’s not gonna find anything better, I’ll tell you that.”

A match.

In the last two weeks Zander had sent me for a physical and a mental health evaluation, in addition to the labs. I guess that should have been a good indication that things were lining up. Still, the news surprised me.

“Give me the broad strokes.”

“Okay,” he said, leaning back in the booth. “Well, all the standard surgical risks. Pain, infection, hernia. Bleeding, blood clots. General anesthesia, two-to three-hour surgery for a laparoscopic nephrectomy. Afterward, a couple of follow-up visits. No driving for two weeks, no lifting anything over ten pounds for a month. That’s it. Donors have the same life expectancy as non-donors. You’ll go on with your life.”

I sat back in my seat. “I need to think about this.”

“Of course.”

“It’s not really a good time for me. I’ve got wedding stuff for the next few months.”

“We can schedule it when you want.”

“And I don’t know if Gibson will give me the time off—”

“He will. I already asked him.”

I snorted.

“Look, I’m not trying to pressure you,” he said. “But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope you did it. This is the best possible scenario for this kid. And Briana’s a friend of mine, and I want to see her relax a little bit. It’s been hard on her.”

Briana. That was a bonus to doing this, if I was being honest. I liked her. Not that she’d know it was me if I did decide to do it. I wanted to donate anonymously.

“I need to think about it,” I said. It was a big decision.

He nodded. “Okay. But I’m just sayin’. This would definitely get you a wedding date.”

“If I do it, I don’t want anyone knowing it’s me.”

He looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. “Why not? Man, you’d be the hero of the whole ER. They’d probably throw you a damn parade—”

“That is exactly why I don’t want anyone to know. I wouldn’t be doing it for the recognition. I’d be doing it to help him. I don’t like that kind of attention.”

I didn’t even tell anyone it was my last day at Memorial West. I didn’t want anyone to make a big deal about it. I didn’t even like people singing “Happy Birthday” to me. Getting tearful thank-yous from Benny’s family and backslaps and handshakes from strangers was my idea of hell.

“If I do it, we’re doing it anonymously and we’re doing it at the transplant center down at the Mayo in Rochester, not here. I don’t want anyone poking their head into my recovery room.”

He let out a sigh. “All right, all right. It’s your thing, I will respect it. But I still think you should ask her.”

I rubbed my forehead tiredly. “I can’t ask her to do this,” I mumbled.

“Why? What’s the worst thing she can say? No?” He took a swallow of his old-fashioned. “Just tell her what you told me. Level with her. Plus your family’s fucking hilarious. She’d probably have the time of her life over there.”

I let out a long breath. “She’d probably think we’re a bunch of weirdos.”

The idea of her being submerged into that chaos was enough to give me heart palpitations. Grandpa trying to run people into the bushes in his electric wheelchair, Mom talking about sex toys and lubricants, while Jafar squawked profanities. No. God, no.

Zander swayed his tumbler at me. “Your family is awesome. Hell, I’d be your date if I could. And I wanna see if you can pull this shit off.” He chuckled into his glass.

I looked at my phone and the string of texts. They didn’t even need me for this conversation, they were off to the races all on their own. They bought this hook, line, and sinker. And why wouldn’t they?

It felt like some strange self-fulfilling prophecy, like I’d created Briana by speaking the lie into the universe. She was exactly the kind of woman I would like to bring home to my family. Smart, successful, likable—beautiful. And she worked with me, just like I’d alluded to when I told them I was seeing someone. Absolutely nobody would feel sorry for me because my ex was marrying my brother if I showed up with this woman on my arm. She was, for all intents and purposes, perfect.

But I had no idea how to broach this subject with her. At all. And part of me worried that if I did, she’d be so turned off or weirded out by it that she’d stop talking to me altogether.

This new friendship was the only good thing happening to me at the moment. I didn’t want to jeopardize that.

Still, the idea of admitting to my family that there was no girlfriend…I couldn’t tell which scenario was worse: the one where I maybe scared off the only friend I’d made since coming here, or the one where I showed up alone while Amy married Jeremiah and everyone watched to see if I’d die of a broken heart.