I Made His Wife’s Dress Now I’ll Marry Another Chapter 46
At six-thirty on Thursday morning, they wheeled my mother toward the operating room.
Before she went in, she called me close and pressed an old thimble into my palm.
“I brought this with me when I married into the Whitmore family. They didn’t give it to me.”
“When you come out, you can keep it yourself.”
“Then hold on to it for me,” she said with a smile. “And don’t prick your hand.”
The red light above the OR doors came on.
For six hours, I held that thimble until it grew warm in my hand. Julien sat to my left. Sofia and her lawyer sat some distance away. No one offered hollow reassurances.
At one-forty in the afternoon, the lead surgeon came out.
“The transplant was a success. The new kidney has begun functioning, and her vital signs are stable.”
My knees went weak, but I didn’t fall.
I caught myself on the back of a chair.
The surgeon continued down the list of risks for the first twenty-four post-op hours. I wrote them all down and confirmed that the other two recipients in the exchange chain had also completed their surgeries successfully. Only when the coordinator announced that all three operating rooms had reported stable outcomes did the breath the entire waiting room had been holding finally release.