Everyone became silent.
He pointed toward me.
“Walk up to a stranger and say, congratulations, you’re the granddaughter my stepmother lost fifty years ago, and by the way, could we have one of your organs?”
Lenora recoiled.
Thad continued.
“You were dying.”
“And that justified this?”
“I saved you!”
“She saved me!”
Lenora shouted.
The monitor beside her accelerated.
Dr. Oay stepped forward, but Lenora lifted one hand.
“No. Let him finish.”
Thad’s breathing was heavy now.
“We needed time.”
“So you married her?”
“I gave her a good life.”
The sentence destroyed whatever pity I might once have had left.
“A good life?”
He turned toward me.
“You had everything.”
“I had a husband who selected me from a laboratory report.”
“You loved me.”
“Yes.”
That silenced him.
I forced myself to continue.
“That’s the part you’ll never understand, Thad. I actually loved you.”
His face twitched.
“And you never loved me at all.”
He did not answer.
He didn’t have to.
Marisol stepped forward.
“This is getting melodramatic. The transplant is complete. Everyone survived. Coraly signed the divorce. We can settle whatever privacy issue exists privately.”
Talia’s eyebrows rose.
“Privacy issue?”
“Whatever you want to call it.”
“Oh, we’re only beginning.”
Talia removed a thick envelope.
Thad stared at it.
And suddenly looked frightened for an entirely different reason.
“What is that?”
Lenora answered.
“The reason you were so desperate to keep Coraly from discovering who she was.”
I looked toward her.
“What do you mean?”
Lenora closed her eyes briefly.
Then opened them.
“My husband, Enoch, created the Bromel Family Trust twenty-three years ago.”
Thad spoke quickly.
“This has nothing to do with Coraly.”
“It has everything to do with her.”
Talia opened the envelope.
“Enoch Bromel died owning seventy-one percent of the voting shares in Bromel & Sons, along with most of the family’s underlying real estate.”
I knew that much.
Thad frequently talked as if he owned the company.
Apparently he didn’t.
Talia continued.
“Lenora received lifetime control.”
Marisol shrugged.
“We know.”
“Upon Lenora’s death, those shares do not automatically pass to you.”
Thad’s face hardened.
