Chapter 5

Chapter 5

The rain kept soaking her through, a cold that cut straight to the bone. A middle-aged woman came running over, tapping Valena's cheeks again and again, trying to get some kind of response.

"Sweetheart? Sweetheart, can you hear me?"

But there was no answer. All Valena could feel was the heaviness of her own eyelids, as if the world around her had slowed to a crawl while her consciousness kept slipping further away. The woman whom Valena would later learn was Bu Marni, a street vendor who'd just closed up her stall for the night didn't waste a second. She pulled Valena under the nearest shop awning, hands trembling as she dialed for emergency help, begging for an ambulance from the nearest hospital as fast as possible.

The wail of a siren registered faintly before Valena's consciousness fully returned how much time had passed in between, she couldn't say for certain.

Bu Marni sat beside her in the ambulance, her face etched with a kind of worry that belonged to someone who'd known Valena for years, not a stranger who'd just found her collapsed on the side of the road. "Sweetheart, can you hear me? Hang in there, we're almost there."

Valena tried to open her mouth, but no sound came out. All she could register was the jolting of the vehicle and the woman's hand gripping hers tightly, as if trying to keep her from drifting too far. There was something strange about that warmth the concern of a stranger who didn't even know her name, and yet it felt far more genuine than the cold stares she'd just gotten from the people she'd called family for nineteen years.

The night stretched on longer than it had any right to. Every jolt of the ambulance sent a fresh wave of pain through her body. The woman's worry beside her was so plain, so raw a stark contrast to Sera and Jorge, who couldn't even bring themselves to look at her after everything that had happened.

"Sweetheart, please, don't fall asleep, listen to me. We're almost at the hospital!" her voice shook.

The ER was flooded with blinding white light as she was wheeled in. The voices around her sounded distant and muffled, like listening from underwater.

When her eyes opened again, a white ceiling greeted her, along with the steady beep of a monitor beside the bed. A nurse was checking the IV line in her arm.

"You're awake," the nurse said gently. "Just hold on, I'll go get the doctor."

The door opened a few minutes later, and the sight of who walked in made Valena freeze.

"Miss Dominique," Sean Weiss said, closing the door behind him. His expression wasn't surprise it was something closer to a worry he'd clearly been carrying for a while. "Or should I call you something else now?"

"Dr. Sean," Valena whispered, her voice still hoarse. "Why are you here?"

"I'm the one handling your case tonight. Quite the coincidence." He sat in the chair beside the bed, his eyes steady on hers. "But what's more surprising to me is your test results."

Valena held her breath.

"You're not doing well, Valena." For the first time, he used her first name, not the family name that now felt foreign to them both. "I've had my suspicions for months, ever since I started monitoring your recovery after the donation. But tonight, everything's confirmed. You have a fairly advanced autoimmune condition."

"How advanced?"

Sean paused, choosing his words with care, as if each one had the power to shatter something even more fragile than her body. "Your immune system is attacking your own tissue including your remaining kidney. The donor surgery accelerated it, far faster than it would have progressed if it had been caught and treated early."

"So because I donated for Leovan, my condition got worse, faster?" Valena's voice was barely audible.

Sean didn't answer right away. He just gave a slow nod, as if he couldn't bring himself to say it out loud.

Valena stared at the ceiling, trying to process it all with a calm that surprised even her. No tears, no outburst. Just an emptiness slowly filling with a new kind of certainty that the sacrifice she'd guarded so carefully was now demanding a price far greater than she'd ever imagined.

"Does my family know I'm here?" she finally asked.

"Not yet. Do you want me to call them?"

Valena shook her head slowly. "No. They already made their decision tonight. I don't want to go back to a place that's made it more than clear it doesn't want me."

Sean studied her for a long moment, something shifting behind his eyes not pity, but a quiet respect that had been building since the first day this girl walked into his office and asked to be tested as a donor without a single word about herself. "In that case," he said quietly, "let me ask you something that might sound completely out of place, given everything you're going through."

Valena turned to him, waiting.

"What are you going to do now? You have no home to go back to, your condition isn't stable, and—" he paused, as if reconsidering whether he should really say what came next, "—you're going to need someone who can make sure you're okay every single day. Someone with the legal standing to make medical decisions for you not just a doctor signing off on your chart."

"What exactly are you trying to say, Doctor?"

Sean let out a long breath, like a man finally acting on something he'd been quietly weighing for months, ever since he'd started watching over the recovery of a girl who never once complained in front of him.

"Marry me, Valena."

Time seemed to stop. Valena searched his face for some sign that this was just a dark joke meant to lighten the mood. There was none. His eyes stayed calm, serious as if the words hadn't come out of nowhere, but had been sitting there for a long time, waiting for the right moment, even if the right moment turned out to look like this pale, broken, soaked in rain.

"You don't even really know me," Valena finally whispered, her voice still rough from the rain and the tears that hadn't quite dried.

"I know enough," Sean answered evenly. "I know you were willing to give up part of yourself for someone who doesn't even consider you family. To me, that's more than enough."

"So," he said, "what

's your answer, Valena?"