CHAPTER 3- NORTHSTAR TOWER
1076 Words
Tessy POV
Twenty-six hours. That's what the text said, and by the time I got dressed that morning, it was down to twenty-two.
I stood in front of the Northstar Tower entrance and looked up until my neck hurt. Glass is going up forever. A revolving door that probably cost more than my car. I made myself walk through it before I could talk myself out of it, before the part of me that knew exactly how this was going to go could win the argument.
I had exactly one day to save my brother's life, and I was about to spend three hours of it standing in a lobby that cost more than our house.
Inside, the floor was so polished I could see my own reflection walking across it, wrong shoes and all. A woman at the front desk looked at me the way people look at something that had wandered off the street.
"I'm here for a corporate giving application," I said. "For medical assistance."
"Do you have an appointment?"
"No. But it's an emergency, my brother needs—"
"I'll need you to fill out an intake form. Someone will call your name."
She slid a clipboard across the counter without looking up again. I stood there a second longer than I needed to, waiting for her to look at me like I was a person and not a line item, and when she didn't, I took the clipboard and found a chair before my legs could decide to do something else, like leave.
I sat in a leather chair that swallowed me whole and filled out boxes with my brother's name, his diagnosis, his hospital, my phone number, over and over on three different pages that all asked the same questions in different words. My hand cramped somewhere around the second page, and I flexed it out under the clipboard so no one would see, because crying in a hospital consult room was one thing and falling apart in a marble lobby felt like something else entirely, something I couldn't afford to let this building see.
A man two chairs down cried quietly into his phone the entire time I was writing, and neither of us looked at each other, because looking would have meant admitting we were in the same place for the same reason. By the time anyone called my name, the clock on the wall said I'd lost two more hours I didn't have.
The woman who finally saw me had a nameplate that said Priya and an office with no windows, just a desk and two chairs and a plant that looked fake but probably wasn't.
"Ms Moretti. Tell me about your brother."
I told her everything. The transplant. The match. The window is closing tonight at eleven. My voice cracked somewhere in the middle and I hated that it did, because I needed her to hear facts, not feelings.
She nodded the whole time like she'd heard this exact story before, which she probably had, a hundred times, from a hundred people sitting in this same chair.
"I understand how urgent this feels," she said. "Our review process typically takes four to six weeks."
"He doesn't have four to six weeks. He has until eleven tonight."
"I wish there were a faster path. There isn't. Every application goes through the committee."
"Is there anyone I can talk to? Anyone who can make an exception?"
"I'm sorry. There isn't."
"Please." I hated the word coming out of my mouth, hated how small it sounded in that small windowless room. "He's twelve. He's my brother."
Priya's face did something close to sympathy, the practiced kind, the kind that comes with training, not feeling. For half a second I thought I had seen something else behind it, something that might have actually wanted to help me if the surrounding building had let it, and then it was gone, folded back into policy.
"I really am sorry," she said, and stood up, which meant the meeting was over whether I agreed to it or not.
She walked me to the door herself, maybe to be kind, maybe to make sure I actually left.
The lobby looked different on the way out. Bigger somehow, colder, every person in it moving as they belonged and I didn't. I made myself start walking toward the exit because staying still wasn't going to save Nathan either. Every step felt like it was costing me minutes I didn't have left to spend.
A ripple went through the room before I understood why, heads turning toward the bank of private elevators on the far side, security straightening off the wall like they'd been waiting for this exact moment. I turned to look too, out of nothing but habit.
That's when the doors opened.
A group of people came out first, suits, tablets, one man talking fast into a phone about a shareholder call. Then him.
I didn't know his face yet, not really, but I knew what he was the second I saw him. The way the whole group moved around him instead of beside him.
The way two security guards fell into step without being told to. The way every single person in that lobby who'd ignored me for three hours suddenly straightened their shoulders.
He crossed the floor toward the private exit without looking at anyone, phone already in his hand, already somewhere else in his head.
Twenty hours left on the clock. Nathan was on the couch at home, pretending he wasn't scared. My mother's handwriting on the back of a receipt, doing math that didn't work.
I don't remember deciding to do it. I just remember my own voice, louder than I knew it could go, cutting across that marble floor.
"Thiago Damon."
Every head in the lobby turned. The talking stopped. Somewhere behind me, a security guard's radio crackled and went quiet.
He didn't turn right away. For one second, maybe two, he kept walking like he hadn't heard his own name shouted across his own building.
Then he stopped.
He turned slowly, the way a man turns when he already knows exactly who's calling him and is deciding whether it's worth his time to look. His eyes found me across the room, flat, unreadable, already measuring something.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
He said nothing.
He just looked at me the way you'd look at a number that didn't add up.
- Writer
