Chapter 4

Sol walks into her second-floor apartment in the shared rowhouse and right on the table in front of her is her laptop. It immediately reminds her of the previous night’s email. Thinking about Franklin and whether she even wanted to go out with him again had distracted her. Now here she is, wired from the supposedly decaf coffee she had on her date, and she reads the email again.

Dear Sol,

My name is Shyla Broward. I know this is out of the blue, and I’m sorry, but there’s just no easy way to do this. Please keep reading because this is important. My mom’s name is Janice Broward, and she knew your dad, Patrick Garnett, in Baltimore in the early 80s when she was at University of Maryland Law School. We live outside of Boston. My mom has chronic kidney disease, and now her kidneys have failed. She’s on dialysis but needs a kidney transplant. She’s on the transplant list, but the wait can be five years, and they say she’s hard to match. I don’t think there’s any way her body can wait that long. She’s only 64 years old. We’re asking all of our family and friends to at least find out if there’s a chance they could be a match and would be willing to donate. We don’t know what else to do. I’m an only child. I don’t match, and I put my name on a list to do an exchange if someone else matches. I feel helpless. I was talking to my mom’s sister last week, and she said she had something to tell me. My mom tried to stop her, but she told me about you. She told me you’re my sister. You’re my mom’s daughter. She had you with your dad, Patrick, but she couldn’t keep you. She asked your dad to take you, and your mom raised you as her own, and they all promised to never tell. That’s all I know. But now my mom needs a kidney, and we’re desperate to find someone who matches. A family member may be less likely to get rejected. I don’t know what I can tell you to even make you believe me, but please, please, I’m begging you to at least talk to me.

Here’s all my contact info. You can write me back at this email address or text me or call me. I’ll come to Baltimore or wherever you are.

Sincerely,
Your sister,
Shyla Broward

Her adorable mixed-breed rescue dog, Jericho, gets up from his giant dog bed and stares at her. “What?” she asks. He always knows when something’s wrong with her. He leans his head on her knee, and she scratches him behind his ear. “Thanks for being a girl’s best friend. Let’s go for a walk and get some air, huh?”

She trades her heels for tennis shoes, then lets him pick which way they walk. Their neighborhood is located in mid-town Baltimore City near Johns Hopkins University, and they both have their favorite routes. He’s pretty big and protective of her, and there are usually lots of students around. The school has its own security guards out on the sidewalks too. Even though Sol loves Baltimore, she’s not naïve about the crime, and she stays on her guard when she’s out, especially at night. The late spring night air has a chill, but it feels refreshing to be outside.

When they get back, she starts searching the internet intently, starting with her “new sister” Shyla Broward. She finds a lawyer in Boston with that name, but she looks black, so that doesn’t seem to match. There are a few others scattered around the country. Does she have a married name? She didn’t mention a husband. Social media yields nothing. No mutual friends. “Janice Broward” is not exactly blowing up the internet either. She never had this much trouble when she was looking up her online dating guys. Now that yielded a lot of information.

She starts looking up basic information about kidney disease and kidney transplants. What the email said is true, but she had never given it much thought. She knew there was a waiting list but didn’t know so many people were dying while waiting on that list. The amount of information she finds is overwhelming, and she’s not even sure which things to read. She finds a sample letter for how to ask people to donate an organ to you. Did Shyla read that same page? She gets lost in the #kidneytransplant hashtag on Instagram for an hour before she asks herself what she’s doing.

“You don’t even know if this is real,” she says out loud. Jericho looks at her with anxious eyebrows, as if to say I’m worried about you—is everything okay? She looks back at him and says, “I know, Coco. Our lives may be about to change.”

Meanwhile Sol asks herself why she doesn’t just ask her mom. Sol’s relationship with her mom is good. They’re not super close like some of her friends are with their moms, but they get along well. Maybe it’s just that with the three girls, she had to spread her love around more. Anyway, she doesn’t want to hurt her mom if it’s not true, but if it is true…If it is true, what does that say about her mom? That she kept the truth from her all these years? Does that mean she loves her less because she’s not really hers? Or more because she chose her when she wasn’t really hers? Or maybe either way, she is really hers because she has raised her as her own? Did her mom adopt her? She has to talk to someone about this. Going around and around in her own head about it is getting her nowhere.