PART 2
I sat at my kitchen table with those papers until my sister arrived at midnight.
She read the date. Then she read it again.
“Wendy,” she said quietly. “He let them cut you open knowing he was leaving.”
“I know.”
“What are you going to do?”
I opened the folder she’d brought. The deed. The loan agreement with his signature and hers. Every medical bill I’d paid, in order, with receipts.
“I’m going to make him pay me back,” I said. “Every dollar. Then I’m going to let him go.”
Brady came home at 2 a.m. He found his suitcases packed and sitting on the front porch. The locks had been changed. My sister’s husband is a locksmith.
He banged on the door for ten minutes. Then he left.
The next morning, I met with a divorce lawyer. She read the loan agreement and smiled for the first time in our meeting.
“This is a valid contract,” she said. “Signed. Witnessed. Dated. He agreed to repay you if you separated. And the house was never marital property.”
Brady’s lawyer tried everything. He said I had “emotionally manipulated a sick man” into signing the loan. He said the house was “earned through his suffering.”
Then my lawyer showed the judge the divorce papers. The ones dated before my surgery.
The judge looked at them for a long moment.
Then she looked at Brady.
“Mr. Albers,” she said, “your wife gave you an organ while you had divorce papers drafted in a drawer. This court will not be rewarding that.”
I kept the house. Brady was ordered to repay the full $84,000. He had to sell his truck and take out a loan from his mother to do it.
His mother paid it. Then she stopped speaking to him.
His sister invited me to Thanksgiving.
As for Gianna, the hospital found out that she’d started dating Brady while he was still her patient. That’s a serious violation. She was fired. Her nursing license was suspended while the state board investigated.
She left Brady four months later. Around the time the money ran out.
I wasn’t sad about any of it. I was just tired.
So I did something for myself.
Last spring, I signed up for a 5K run organized by a living donor organization. People who’ve given a kidney, a piece of a liver, bone marrow. Strangers who decided someone else’s life was worth a scar.
I’d never run more than a mile in my life.
I trained for four months.
On race day, I crossed the finish line in 41 minutes, sweaty and crying. A woman my age, who’d given her kidney to her brother, hugged me at the end.
“Was it worth it?” she asked me. “Even after everything?”
I thought about it.
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t regret saving his life. I regret wasting mine on him.”
I used the money Brady paid me back to start a small scholarship at my high school. For students who want to go into medicine.
It’s called the Living Gift Scholarship.
The first winner wants to be a transplant surgeon.
THE END.
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Giving everything to someone doesn’t mean they deserve it. But it says everything about who you are.
What would you have said to Brady at that party? Tell us in the replies.