"When the baby's out, we harvest the kidney and he divorces her." "Excuse me?" I said, voice small because I needed it to be small. I needed it to be someone else's mistake. "Do you hear me?" Loretta's laugh was soft and cruel through the tiny speaker. "Corbin signs. We take what we need. He gets a clean break." "I—" I put a hand over the phone, pressed it against my ear like I could hold her words inside me. "Who is this? Loretta, what are you talking about?" "No games tonight," she said. "This is business. You should have stayed out of it." "Corbin promised me—" I started and stopped. That sentence had been the foundation of my life and love and at some point the foundation had been sold out from under me. "Promises are tiny," Loretta said. "He gave you a life; he gave you children. When we take the kidney we give him a reason to move on. He will sign. He will leave. And then you will be gone." "You're lying," I said. The lie was the only thing that could keep me standing. There was a pause long enough for a breath I hadn't meant to take. "Am I?" Loretta asked. "Do you want proof?" I thought of Corbin in his study, the floor-to-ceiling windows, the bottle of single-barrel whiskey on his desk. I thought of his pen, the way he signed things with a certain