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I swallowed a lump in my throat. “Then, I think you should pick her out something really nice.”
Granted, a precious gem would probably boost me over Neil’s ridiculous dollar limit. But Sasha Tangen had sold everything but her wedding ring so her daughter could hear. It was ridiculous and just plain wrong that she’d had to make the choice.
With a little guidance, Molly picked out a pair of round-cut diamond earrings for Sasha, and some teardrop pearls for Susan, since we decided we shouldn’t forget her. Then, Molly’s eyes fell upon a set of necklaces. When pushed together, the pendants made a platinum heart, with a small sapphire in each half.
“Hey, that’s my birthstone!” Molly exclaimed.
My throat stuck shut, but I managed to rasp out, “Mine, too.”
“My birthday is September eighteenth. What’s yours?” she asked excitedly.
“September twenty-first.” Just a few days—and years—apart. I wondered how Joey Tangen had felt about that. Had he even noticed the coincidence?
“We should get this,” Molly stated firmly. “This is here for a reason. You can have half, and I can have half. Like a friendship bracelet, but for sisters.”
I hesitated. What would Susan think? What would Sasha think? I was already in way too deep with the computer and the clothes. Symbolically-binding jewelry might be way over the line. “Won’t our kidneys be like a friendship bracelet?”
She snorted. “Yeah, probably. But this is something we can wear on the outside, to remember each other. Since I don’t know when I’ll see you, again.”
Oh, man. She really knew how to tug at my heartstrings. And my purse strings. I nodded to the woman behind the brightly illuminated glass counter, who was no doubt ready to swoon at the commission she was about to make off us.
“Thank you, Sophie,” Molly said, suddenly far more serious and mature than I’d seen her. “You didn’t have to do all this.”
“I know I didn’t. But I wanted to. I remember what it was like to be your age. If someone had done this for me—”
“No. Not the shopping.” She paused, her face scrunched up in concentration as she searched for her words. “If my dad hadn’t raised me…if he had done to me what he did to you, maybe I wouldn’t be so cool about meeting my sister. I probably wouldn’t even care enough to give away my kidney.”
“I think you would.” There was no way that someone as gregarious and positive as Molly would bear that kind of grudge. “But there are other factors here, too. You know that Neil’s daughter died.”
Molly nodded.
“Well, I don’t know your mom very well. But I don’t want anyone to go through what I saw Neil go through. And if I’d needed help when I was your age, I would have hoped someone would be kind enough to have given it to me.”
She leaped at me, her gangly arms wrapping around me in a huge, tight hug. I had no doubt that she meant what she’d said; this wasn’t about a shopping spree or having a rich relative. She was more perceptive than I’d given her credit for, and she’d considered this meeting and this transplant from my angle, the way I’d considered it from hers.
We wore the necklaces out of the store.
After a stop at the Cheesecake Factory for the promised dessert, we headed back to the hotel. Molly talked a blue streak all the way, filling me in on her school and her friends and her hobbies. She loved Sondheim, though he “writes like he hates sight readers”, and loathed Andrew Lloyd Webber, who “writes like he hates singers”. She idolized Kristin Chenoweth and wanted desperately to be in a production of Spring Awakening before she was “too old”. Her dreams were no different than scores of other teens’, but as far as I was concerned, they were unique and precious.
Any reservations I’d had about meeting Molly had been totally removed by just a few hours of shopping. There was no doubt in my mind, now, that I would want to maintain a relationship with her. I wouldn’t drop out of her life the way Joey Tangen had dropped out of mine, and the thought that anyone felt I might be capable of that, especially when it came to a girl as bright and friendly and loving as Molly, made me ill.
But as we pulled up to the hotel and the bellman started unloading our bags, dread began to creep over me. I really had gone a little far with the purchases. And to anyone outside of my head, I would look like I was overcompensating. Maybe I was.
“What’s all this?” Sasha asked with a laugh of disbelief as she crossed the lobby. All of Molly’s treasures were piled high on a luggage cart, and I suddenly wanted to dive behind it and hide.
