CHAP 1 — The Donor’s Mother
The doctor said my daughter’s blood was the only thing keeping my ex-husband alive.
For one breathless second, I honestly did not know whether I was strong enough to save the man who had ruined me.
“Ms. Morrison,” Dr. Rachel Kim said, standing in the corridor outside the pediatric donor suite, “your daughter is the only compatible donor in our emergency registry. Without a transfusion soon, the patient may not survive.”
The patient.
They kept calling him that.
As if not saying his name would protect me from six years of memory.
My hand tightened around the metal railing.
“Who is he?”
Dr. Kim hesitated.
That pause told me everything.
“Dominic Castellano.”
The hospital lights blurred.
Dominic Castellano.
Billionaire CEO of Castellano Holdings.
Heir to one of New York’s oldest hotel families.
The man who once kissed rain off my cheek in Washington Square Park and promised he would choose me against the world.
The husband who divorced me after his family convinced him I had betrayed him.
The man who called me barren when doctors said the fertility treatments had failed.
The man who remarried Vanessa Ashworth before the ink on our divorce decree had fully dried.
He was dying three floors above me.
And Sophie, my six-year-old daughter, his daughter, was the only match.
“Mommy?” Sophie tugged my sleeve. “Is the sick person going to be okay?”
I looked down at her.
Those impossible golden eyes stared back at me.
Dominic’s eyes.
Honey in sunlight.
The kind of eyes people remembered. The kind of eyes I had spent six years pretending came from some forgotten branch of my family because the truth was too heavy for a child.
“The doctors are trying very hard,” I whispered.
“Am I giving blood?”
“Maybe.”
“Will it hurt him?”
“No, baby. It would help him.”
“Like a superhero?”
I swallowed.
“Exactly like a superhero.”
She smiled.
That nearly broke me.
Dr. Kim’s voice softened.
“We will take only what is medically safe. There is an ethics physician present, a pediatric specialist, and your consent can be withdrawn at any time. But we are running out of options.”
I nodded, but my mind was already six years away.
Dominic standing in our penthouse bedroom with photographs scattered across the bed.
A man’s hand on my back outside a hotel.
A kiss that never happened.
A lie cropped carefully enough to look like truth.
His grandmother calling me a social climber.
Dominic’s voice cutting through me.
“Maybe it’s better we never had children.”
I had discovered the pregnancy three weeks after the divorce papers were signed.
I tried to tell him.
His lawyer answered.
Any claim of pregnancy will be considered fraudulent harassment.
So I disappeared.
Not because I wanted to.
Because I believed the man I loved had chosen his family’s lie over my voice.
Now Sophie was asking whether she could help him.
I knelt in front of her.
“You don’t have to be brave because adults are scared.”
She touched my face.
“But you said helping matters.”
“I did.”
“Then I want to help.”
Children should not be kinder than the people who hurt them.
May you like
But Sophie was.
So I signed the consent forms with a hand that trembled only after the pen left the paper.
