Chapter 6: The Ghost in the Mirror
I ended up in the parking lot of a 24-hour drugstore, the neon sign buzzing overhead like a dying insect. I sat there, clutching the steering wheel until my hands cramped. I looked in the rearview mirror and didn’t recognize the woman looking back.
I called Hannah. She was my best friend since kindergarten, the person who had held my hair back after my first breakup and held my hand during the transplant.
“I caught them,” I said when she answered.
“Caught who? Mer, it’s midnight, what’s wrong?”
“Daniel. And Kara. In our bed.”
The silence on the other end of the line lasted for a full ten seconds. “Don’t move,” she said. “Send me your location. I’m coming to get you.”
The next few hours were a blur of Hannah’s guest room, hot tea that I couldn’t taste, and the violent shaking of my own body. I felt a physical sensation in my side—a phantom itch where my kidney used to be. It was the ultimate irony. I had given a part of myself to sustain a man who was using that very life force to betray me with my own blood.
Daniel showed up at Hannah’s door at 3:00 a.m. He looked like a man who had been through a car wreck—disheveled, eyes red-rimmed, his shirt literally inside out.
Hannah kept the chain on the door. “Five minutes,” she barked at him. “And if you step one foot inside, I’m calling the police.”
I walked to the door. I wanted to see him. I wanted to see if the man I loved was still in there somewhere.
“Meredith, please,” he sobbed. “It’s not what it looks like. I was weak. I was scared.”
“It looked like you were sleeping with my sister, Daniel,” I said. “Is there a metaphorical interpretation I’m missing?”
“I felt trapped!” he blurted out, the words tumbling over each other. “Ever since the surgery, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Every time I looked at you, I saw what I owed you. I felt like a project, not a man. Kara… she didn’t look at me like a patient. She just looked at me like a guy. I needed to feel like I wasn’t just your ‘miracle’.”
“So to feel like a ‘guy’, you decided to destroy our family? You decided to destroy my relationship with my only sister?”
“It just happened,” he whispered.
“Nothing ‘just happens’ for ten months, Daniel,” I said, my voice rising for the first time. “I know how long it’s been. I’m not stupid. I remember Christmas. I remember you two laughing in the kitchen while I was still struggling to walk up the stairs. Was she ‘helping you process’ back then, too?”
He flinched. The truth was out, and it was uglier than either of us could have imagined.
“Get out,” I said. “And Daniel? Don’t call me. Call your lawyer. Because I’m taking back everything else I have left.”
