“We.Wewill go back and tell him you’re fine, even though you’re not completely fine. Stage one cancer is still cancer.”
“Daniel… I’m not going back.” It feels like I’m giving a five-year-old instructions—soft and slow.
He shakes his head and reaches for my hand, pulling me to stand between his legs. “Scarlet…” He presses my hand to hischest. I feel his scar beneath his shirt. “You’re my heart. I lived for you. It’s a miracle that I’m even alive, but I am. And so are you. We are two miracles. Don’t you see that? In spite of everything, we’re meant to be together. The cheating doesn’t—”
“Whoa.” I step back. “I didn’t cheat on you. We weren’t together.”
“We were engaged.” He jumps to his feet. I take another step back.
“Were. I left you—I left us. I grieved you and what we had.”
“By jumping into bed with another man?”
I turn and look out the window. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to apologize for. Having cancer? Choosing to live my last days on my own terms? Finding comfort in the touch of another man when I thought I was going to die? Or not actually dying?”
“Tell me it was just sex, Scarlet. Tell me you didn’t really mean what you said to him. Tell me—”
“It was nothing.” I face him again, emotions burning my eyes. “It was a lie. But at some point that lie became my greatest truth. And that ‘nothing’ turned into something that right now feels like everything. Now I’m left with the cold reality thatwewere the lie, Daniel.”
His face contorts into a mask of confusion. “What are you talking about?”
I forgave myself for this when my death seemed imminent. Now I need to let go of it in order to live.
“When you were in the hospital…” I draw in a shaky breath as the past slams into me again “…and the doctors said you needed a heart transplant soon or you were going to die, I panicked.”
Daniel’s eyes narrow. “We all did.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t just panic. I did something…”
“What do you mean?”
All these years, he’s had no idea how much truth there was to his joking about me being a thief who stole his heart.
“I moved your name to the top of the transplant list, and I deposited a sizable amount of money in the accounts of anyone who would notice the change in the list.”
“You said…” He shakes his head. “You said the recipient died before the heart arrived. You said I was the closest match, and if I didn’t take it, the donor heart would be lost. You said it was a miracle.”
Oscar told me to “save the boy.” He said that between right and wrong, life and death, there existed a gray area called love. In his completely fucked-up book of life principles, he insisted that love was boundless, fairness was a flaw of the weak, and morals killed more people than they saved.
Until five months ago when I left London, I was a product of Oscar Stone, equal parts nature and nurture—a third-generation thief destined to get caught. We all do, eventually.
“I lied.”
“You lied? You LIED!?!”
“I’m sorry. Forthat, I am truly sorry.”
“So… so…” He laces his fingers behind his neck and turns his gaze to the ceiling. “You’re sorry for lying to me or you’re sorry for stealing a heart that should not have been mine?”
“Both.”
He laughs the most cynical laugh. “So looking back, almost eight years later, you wish you wouldn’t have stolen the heart?”
I shake my head. “I wish I wouldn’t have taken a life.”
“Semantics.”
“No. I had no issue with stealing the heart. I’d do it again. If there were some bank of hearts available to the highest bidder, I’d lie and steal from almost anyone to give you life. Even now.” I need him to understand that my love for him has not vanished. It never will. “But that heart didn’t belong to the highest bidder.It belonged to another human, just like you, desperate to live. So I didn’t just steal your heart. I stole a life.ThatI would take back.ThatI would undo if I could. Even if…”
