My Kidney, His Cruel Joke

side was a dull

my sweater. It was a small price to pay, I told my

usand dollars in cash. Every dime of my savings, every penny from sellin

of Ethan

ago, his voice weak and

ht, Chloe. It' s the only way they'

promised, my own voice trembling with a mi

place called "The Gilded Cage." An odd choice for a man supposedly on his deathbed,

thick with the smell of expensive perfume and liquor. Men in tailored suits and women in glittering dresse

back. As I navigated through the crowd, my side flared with a sharp, searing pain, and I stumbled against a velvet-roped

via Hayes. Her laugh was like shatt

ally did it. Sold a kidney!

roze, pressing myself

s voice. Not weak or strained,

gling musician act, the sob story about my famil

. This had to be a mistake. A h

s heir, brought to his knees by a rare disease only a poor little nursing student coul

s Miller. I had thought it was a coincidence. He told me he was an orph

ke it' s the holy grail," one of Ethan' s friends chimed in, his vo

do with the money, Eth

my chest. "I don't know. Maybe I' ll use it to buy Olivia

s. The money I' d bled for. The organ I had s

oving that someone so plain, so... common, would literally rip out a pie

oar in my ears. Two years. Two years of what I thought was love, of shared dreams, of holding him while he

flushed with champagne and triumph. He was wearing a suit that probably cost more than my entire nursing scho

or his life. It was fo

, filled with the price of my body and my future, slipped from my grasp. It

ight there on the floor of that lounge, and th