“Kidney failure.”

For the second time, Alexis reeled backward as if Candi had slapped her. The back of her legs hit the chair, and she sank into it.

“He was in a bad car accident a few years ago, and it destroyed his kidneys,” Candi said, voice shaking. “He’s been on dialysis, but his kidney function is not coming back. He needs a transplant.”

“So you sought me out because . . .” Alexis couldn’t even finish the sentence. Sardonic laughter became the period on the unfinished thought.

“You could be a match,” Candi whispered.

Alexis squeezed her eyes shut. How was this happening?

“If you’re a match, you could save him. He’s been on the donor list for two years.”

Alexis wanted to cover her ears and yell La-la-la-la. She didn’t want to care. Not about him. Not about Candi.

“I know this is a shock—”

Alexis opened her eyes. “How long have you known about me?”

Candi’s hesitance was an answer all on its own.

Alexis’s tone hardened. “How long?”

“I found out three years ago.”

Three years. Alexis exhaled an entire lifetime’s worth of unanswered questions, only to inhale another lifetime’s worth of new ones. Did that mean he had known about her for three years too? Or had he always known about her? Either way, he had obviously not cared enough to reach out himself.

“He wouldn’t let me contact you before,” Candi said, as if reading Alexis’s mind.

So he had known about her, at least for that long. Alexis rose slowly. “Maybe you should have respected his wishes.”

“I can’t. We’re running out of time. He’s at the top of the donor list, but he’s been there twice before, and each time something went wrong with the donor. If he doesn’t get a kidney soon—”

“How soon?” Alexis heard herself ask.

“A few months. We don’t really know.”

Empathy warred with self-preservation. And if that wasn’t the story of her entire life, she didn’t know what was.

“I know what I’m asking is a big deal,” Candi said. “To give a kidney to a total stranger.”

Alexis puffed out a joyless laugh and shook her head. Giving a kidney to a total stranger would be easier.

Candi stepped closer. “Do you want me to beg? I will.”

No, she didn’t want Candi to beg. No one should have to bargain for the life of a loved one. Alexis knew the soul-sucking hopelessness of that, of falling to her knees and promising doctors, researchers, and God that she’d do anything, say anything, give anything, if they could just save her mother. None of it had been enough.

Sometimes, hope was a fool’s bargain.

She wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

“Please, Alexis,” Candi said, resorting to begging at last.

Alexis pressed her fingers into the lines forming on her own forehead. “I need to think.”

“But—”

“You’ve known about me for three years, Candi. I deserve a couple of days to get used to it.”

Candi’s hands once again disappeared inside the cuffs of her sweatshirt as she folded her arms across her torso. The pose might have seemed defensive from someone else, but Candi was simply resigned. Her throat tightened with a deep swallow, followed by a nod. “Okay.”

“How can I contact you?”

Wordlessly, Candi retrieved her bag from the floor by her chair. She dug out a small notebook and a pen and scribbled her phone number on a blank piece of paper.

Alexis folded it into her hand.

“I’ve been staying at a hotel,” Candi said. “I have to go back to Huntsville soon.”

“I understand,” Alexis managed to say.

Candi’s hands disappeared into her sweatshirt again. “So will you call me or—”

“I need some time.”

Candi’s lips parted as if she wanted to say more, probably to remind Alexis that time was something she didn’t have. Alexis would’ve been a hypocrite if she didn’t understand that. Nothing screamed as loudly as the persistent tick tick tick of time’s cruel clock when every second brought you closer to the last.

Candi nodded woodenly before turning away. Alexis watched her sling her bag over one rigid shoulder and then, with one last look behind her, walk away. Her footsteps were deliberate but dejected.

A moment passed, and then the kitchen door thwap-thwapped behind her.

Several more moments later, Jessica appeared in the doorway. “Everything okay?”

Alexis blinked out of her stupor. “Can you and Mariana clean up? I have something I need to do.”

Jessica hesitated. “I—yes. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I have no idea.”

“Alexis—”

Alexis ducked around her and walked through the kitchen in a fog to the back door. She grabbed her purse and coat. They were robotic functions, as rote and unintentional as the beating of her heart and the constriction of her lungs with every breath. In the alley outside where she parked her car, a group of women walked by in honky-tonk attire, leaning on one another and laughing drunkenly. A detached part of Alexis’s mind wondered about them, wondered if they knew how lucky they were to be so carefree, to have just missed the teetering edge of a before-and-after chasm that would forever change Alexis’s life. Again. Because no matter what happened, no matter what she decided, life would once again never be the same.

She barely remembered driving home, but suddenly she was in her driveway, car idling with an assaulting silence. When had she turned the radio off? She always drove with it on, preferring the mindless chatter of DJs and news shows to the unending chaos of her own thoughts.

She turned off the car and pulled out the key. Her hands fell to her lap. She knew what she had to do but couldn’t get her muscles to do the work this time. She stared at the house, its interior dark but for a single lamp in the window. Her mother had been gone more than three years, but it still felt like her house.

In the first few weeks following her mother’s death, she’d vowed to sell the place and move. Maybe to a modern loft downtown, where she could lose herself in the noise and the lights of Honky Tonk Row. But then the idea began to feel like a betrayal. Her mother had worked two jobs in order to buy the house. Her sacrifice deserved more.

And so Alexis had stayed. Eventually, she’d made it her own. Frayed couches made way for new furniture. Walls were painted and cupboards replaced.

It had taken years to stop feeling the ache of loss every time she pulled into the driveway. But sometime in the past year, the ache had settled into its kinder form, the softness known as nostalgia.

Alexis dragged herself from the car and up the front walk. Beefcake greeted her with a yowl from the top of the stairs as she trudged up the steps. Her bedroom was the last room on the right down a long hallway. Inside her closet, she stood on tiptoes to retrieve an overstuffed shoebox.

Cleaning out her mother’s things had been the toughest part of her death. The finality of it. An entire life, now relegated to a few items—a crocheted blanket her mother had made, some clothes Alexis couldn’t stand to part with, a stack of mismatched dishes, a collection of mementos.

And this box of documents and photos and cards that Alexis figured she’d find the time and peace of mind to organize one day. She couldn’t remember precisely where she’d put the specific card she was looking for.

It hadn’t seemed important enough before to put it someplace special; just a simple card attached to flowers at the funeral.

All Alexis remembered was the name.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Hey, have you ever seen the Russian’s wife?”

“What?” Noah looked up from the disaster that was Colton’s laptop. He’d been working for two hours in Colt’s palatial estate and had become grumpy. Not only from Colton’s complete inability to stop destroying his own security but from the nagging sense that Noah had officially become a fraud.

Here he sat in a house that probably cost more than most Americans made in a decade, a house large enough for twenty people to live like kings. And while the old Noah would have been raging against an economic system that allowed that kind of wealth to accumulate at the very top, he was, instead, making his own money off it.

So, yeah, he was grumpy.

“The Russian’s wife,” Colton repeated. “Have you ever met her?”

Noah side-eyed him. “No. Why?”

“I don’t think she exists.”

Noah snorted and lifted his beer to his lips. “That’s ridiculous. Of course she exists.”

“No one has ever seen her. I think she’s a figment of his imagination.”

Noah rolled his eyes. “He’s a professional athlete. He couldn’t have a fake wife. Just google her.”

“I did. There are zero pictures of her. I mean, zip. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

Noah grumbled again. “Don’t you have any friends? I’m working here.”

“That hurts, man. I thought we were friends.”

Guilt forced an apology from his lips. “Fine. But don’t you have somewhere to be? I thought famous people had to go be famous and shit.”

“Nope.” Colt slung a six string onto his lap and whipped out a quick set of chords.

Noah glanced up. “That new?”

Colt shrugged. “Something I’m working on for the next album.”

His voice had taken on an almost imperceptible tightness. His friend—and they were friends, which was so fucking weird—had a lot riding on his next album. His first two went platinum, but his last release didn’t have a single top-ten hit.

“You could investigate it, you know.”

Noah peered over his glasses. “Investigate what?”

“The Russian’s wife.”

“Why me?”

“Because you work for the CIA, right?”

“Yes,” Noah deadpanned. The guys were convinced his company was just a cover for something much more exciting.