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“I’ve got great news for you,” Dr. Brown announced, a smile adorning his mustached face as he stepped into the hospital room. “We’ve got a kidney for you.”
Cammie’s jaw dropped open as she turned from the doctor to look at Kenzie and Chance. Both of them shrugged.
“Don’t look at us,” Kenzie said. “We weren’t matches.”
“Then how...” Cammie swiveled her head back around to the doctor standing on the side of the hospital bed opposite her friends. “No way did I get a match off the regular donor list this soon. There’s too many people ahead of me.”
Dr. Brown nodded. “That’s correct. This was a private donation, with the organ designated just for you.”
Cammie and her friends looked at each other again, eyebrows raised in curiosity, before she turned back to the doctor. “Well?” she prompted after realizing he wasn’t going to volunteer the information the three of them were dying to know. “Who gave me the kidney?”
“Like I said, it was a private donor.”
“You won’t tell me the name?”
“They asked me not to.” Dr. Brown clapped his hands, rubbed his palms together. “But the point is, a donor came forward that was a match, and we now have a kidney for you. There’s still some testing and preparation involved to ensure both parties are up for the surgery, but this donor is a great match. So great that if I wasn’t a man of science, I’d be convinced fate stepped in to take care of you. We’re going to move this along as quickly as we can, so we’re going to get the rest of your scans and labs taken care of this week. If there are no issues, and I feel pretty confident that there won’t be, we should be able to get you into the operating room by next week.”
“So soon?” Kenzie asked. “She doesn’t need to... prepare for it or something?”
“We’re putting a rush on everything. It’s amazing how fast the process moves along when the donor has the money to do so and is willing to use it,” Dr. Brown answered, before turning toward her. “You will be on immunosuppressive medication for the rest of your life to help keep the new kidney from being rejected, but your lifespan just got a lot longer. We can schedule for a later date if you’d like, but you’re looking at a recovery time of at least a week, so the sooner we do the surgery...”
“Whatever you recommend is fine,” Cammie agreed, not needing any time to think about it. She’d already been in the hospital for a week. The sooner she got the transplant, surely the sooner her body would recuperate enough for her to go home. Home, where all she had for company would be the walls around her and the silence filling the space between them.
The doctor nodded his head at her, then at Chance and Kenzie, before leaving.
“Could the donor be Lucky?” Kenzie asked, echoing Cammie’s initial thought.
“I still haven’t heard from him,” Chance responded, his gaze on the floor. “And after the doctor’s comment about money... I know he never made it to Denver to compete, so that couldn’t have been him.”
Cammie noted that he always looked anywhere but at her when speaking of Lucky, the runaway husband no one had heard from since she’d been hospitalized.
“It had to be someone from town,” she thought out loud. “You know how the gossip blazes through Cook County. Someone knew I needed a kidney, so they got checked, but didn’t want anyone asking them anything, so they opted to stay anonymous.”
Chance and Kenzie looked at each other for a moment, but didn’t say anything. She knew what they were thinking. To their knowledge, no one in Cook County had that kind of money, not even anyone from New Hope.
“You two need to head out of here before it gets late,” Cammie suggested, to remind the pair they’d been about to leave before the doctor had given them the news. “You have a nice drive back.”
“I hate to leave you here,” Kenzie said for the second time that night as she again hugged her.
“Like I said earlier, I can actually sleep when you’re not hovering over me like a mother hen.” She winked, making sure her friend knew she was joking, and truly appreciated her concern.
“Fine, but I will be back here soon to bother you, and I’m going to keep bothering you until we can bring you back home.” Kenzie smiled. “I’m so glad they found a donor. If I knew who it was, I’d kiss him. Or her.”
“You better mean on the cheek,” Chance said gruffly as he took Kenzie by the elbow and herded her toward the door, earning a playful jab to the chest in response.
He paused just at the door. “If I hear anything from him, I’ll tell you immediately,” he said.
Cammie nodded, throat too clogged to speak. She waited until he was out the door before she allowed the tears to fall.
****
“GOOD MORNING, LUCKY,” the nurse said cheerily as she stepped across his room and opened the blinds, allowing sunshine to spill across the sheet covering his broken body. She was a petite mocha-skinned lady, but had the fierceness of an Amazon when she felt it necessary. Her dark brows knit together as she frowned at him from where she hovered at his bedside. “A good morning to call your family. You hear me talking to you, Lucky Penny Masters?” she asked.
Lucky growled, hating his middle name and the nurse for using it. “Trust me, my family is better off without me.”
“It’s better they keep wondering what happened to you? It’s better you don’t have the support of your family right now?”
Lucky looked down at his cast-covered leg and grunted. He’d been unconscious for three days after the accident, missing the chance to see Cammie before they had moved her to Denver. He didn’t even have the balls to call and explain, knowing she must hate him, and he damn sure didn’t want to go home to her empty-handed. With a broken leg and a head injury, he’d be more a nuisance than a help to her. Thankfully, his identification had been lost in the accident, so the hospital hadn’t known who to call on his behalf, and he’d regained consciousness by the time it had been found and returned to him. They couldn’t contact his wife or brother, not even the meddlesome but well-meaning nurse, because he wouldn’t allow them to.
“I don’t need anyone’s help. As for my family, my brother has a good wife to take care of him, and he’ll take care of mine. He’s a far better help to her than I am.”
“I wouldn’t say that. That deal you made with the devil sure helped her out a great deal. Just got the news. Your wife is getting a kidney.”
Lucky’s throat clogged as his spirit soared. The bastard had kept his word. He thanked God for the painkillers that had made him spill all to the nurse his first conscious night in the hospital. Without her help, he’d never have come up with the plan that was going to save Cammie’s life. “I guess I finally did one thing right.”
“More than that, I’m sure.” The nurse adjusted the IV tube in his arm before pulling up a chair to settle into. “Why are you so hard on yourself? So convinced your family is better off without you?”
“Are you moonlighting as my therapist now, Tisha? Nursing not paying enough?”
The small woman stared him down with stern eyes that shone with determination, and Lucky knew she could hold that pose for however long it took to get an answer, even if it took days.
“Do you harass all your patients this way?”
“Only the stubborn fools. It’s how I get my kicks.”
Lucky grinned at that, unable to dislike the woman’s candor.
“I’m a screw-up, have always been a screw-up. I try to help people, but I never seem able to. People get hurt bad because of it.”
Tisha angled her head to the side, interest piqued. “How so?”
“My mother was an addict. Addicted to drugs and bums. She had me while trying to land a man who would support her, but all she got out of that deal was screwed. Royally. I should have been her meal ticket, her lucky penny.” He swallowed down the sour bile that always rose in his throat when reminded of the origin of his stupid name. “I was a failure. The man who fathered me never gave her a dime. I ended up costing her money instead of bringing it in.”
“It is not a child’s job to provide an income. It works the other way,” Tisha advised softly.
“Not in our household. I tried to earn her favor. I’ve been working on ranches since I was twelve years old, working on cars, competing in rodeos, risking my neck to give her the money she wanted. I tried to take care of her.”
“What happened?”
“She spent the money I gave her on drugs for her and her worthless boyfriends. No matter what I did, it was never enough. She had no interest in being my mother. I wasn’t good enough for her to give up the drugs and the loser men. I could never get through to her, to show her how life would have been better for her if she’d just quit using and quit seeking attention in the wrong place.”
“She was a grown woman,” Tisha said, “with a mind of her own. You can’t blame yourself for her decisions or actions.”
“I could have done something. I could have gotten her help, but I just kept giving her money.” Lucky breathed in deep, pushing past the pain in his ribs as he did. “I was just giving her a way to buy more drugs. Maybe if I’d tried harder, I could have gotten her to stop. I could have gotten her to love my brother and me and just... be happy. If I hadn’t given up and left her the night she overdosed, maybe she’d still be here. Maybe she’d have gotten herself clean. But I didn’t. Hell, I don’t even know if she overdosed by accident or on purpose. I’ll never know. I just know I didn’t save her.”
“That’s a big maybe.” Tisha rested her hand on the bandage covering Lucky’s wrist. “We all have our struggles. Nobody can help us get through what is our own battle. Your mother dying of an overdose, intentional or not, had nothing to do with you.”
“She wasn’t the only woman I failed to save.”
Tisha sat back in the chair, clasping her hands together in her lap. “Who else needed saving?”
“Her name was Sylvie Case.” Lucky ignored the tightness in his chest that came whenever he forced himself to recall that night. “I thought she was just some woman passing through town, looking for a one-night stand like so many countless others.”
“But she wasn’t?”
“No, and she wasn’t some random woman. I definitely wasn’t a random guy.” Lucky shook his head, winced at the pain, and stopped the movement. “She’d seen me on some rodeo show on ESPN. She was a serious buckle bunny, and according to her sister, she’d developed an obsession with me after her fiancé ditched her. She came all the way from California to Colorado to find me, thinking we’d fall in love and I’d marry her.”
“Sounds like she had some major issues.”
“Yeah, but... if I wasn’t the kind of guy I am, I wouldn’t have been in that bar the night she rolled in. I wouldn’t have been such an easy guy for her to pick up. I would have seen that something was off. Instead, I just saw an easy lay and took what she offered. If I had any moral fiber to my being, I wouldn’t have taken that girl back to the motel, and I wouldn’t have found her dead in the bathtub, bathing in her own damn blood all because she realized too late I wouldn’t marry her.”
“Your mama named you right, boy, because you are damned lucky you got those broken bones right now.”
Frowning, Lucky angled his head to see the nurse better. “Huh?”
“If you weren’t already all broken, I’d slap the stupid out of you.” Tisha stood up and planted her hands on her curvy hips. “If you didn’t have any moral fiber, you wouldn’t be thinking about your mama now and you damn sure wouldn’t be thinking about some disturbed woman that you had nothing but one meaningless night with, no matter how troubled she was or how bad the outcome of that night was. You wouldn’t give a damn about either of them.” She leaned in closer. “But I will tell you this. You have too many blessings to be lying up in here throwing a pity party. Every day in this hospital I see women lose their children before they even get to hold them, I see people lose the love of their life to cancer, and I see people in here who would love to have someone send them flowers or a damn card, but they don’t get anything. You have a life ahead of you, honey, and you have family. Your mama was an addict who failed her children, and you banged a mentally ill woman you couldn’t have known had issues. Get the hell over it and call your family. God didn’t let you survive that wreck just for you to give up on life.”
With that, she walked out of the room, leaving Lucky to his thoughts.
Get the hell over it.
He almost laughed at the woman’s fiery attitude, but thinking of that reminded him of Cammie’s own fire. Did she still have that fire? Or had he broken her when he’d failed to show at the hospital?
He sighed heavily. So many things to figure out.
He glanced down at his battered body and sighed heavier. Well, there wasn’t much else he could do but think.