Thomas

Florence told him. Afterwards Nigel couldn't remember her words — only that she sat on the edge of the bed, took Thomas's hand, the one without the lines, and spoke very softly, the way you speak to children when you wake them in the night.

Thomas didn't cry. He looked out of the window for a long time at the grey roof where the pigeons sat, and his fingers slowly closed and opened on the blanket.

"The sixteenth of August," he said at last. "A Sunday. She didn't ring at eight. First time in six years. I waited until midnight. Then I thought…" He swallowed. "I thought she'd decided again. That on the third of August she'd seen me like this — all tubes, yellow — and lost her nerve. That it had been a goodbye."

"She died that same day," Florence said. "In the morning. In the garden."

"I hated her for a month," Thomas said. "Can you imagine? A month. And she was already…"

He closed his eyes. Lily turned towards the wall.

Nigel stood by the door. He'd expected to meet a stranger, and instead he saw a man who went quiet exactly the way Mum used to when things were at their worst.

Brother. The word still didn't sit right in his hand.

Then Thomas asked Lily to raise the head of the bed, and talked for almost an hour. About the third of August. Mum had arrived at half past ten, in her blue coat even though it was twenty-five degrees outside, holding a yellow rose in a pot with both hands, like a baby. They'd talked for six hours. The nurses had tried to throw her out twice.

"She talked about you," Thomas said. "The whole time. Showed me photos on her phone — she'd learned how to scroll through them specially for me." He almost smiled. "'Katherine's the strongest of us. Nigel's the kindest. Florence is the bravest.' That's what she said. For six years I heard about you every Sunday. I knew Katherine won't eat tomatoes. That Nigel made Mum a bookshelf that would survive a nuclear war. That Florence took a photo of a sunset on Skye and never showed it to anyone, because she thought it had come out too beautiful."

Florence made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob.

"She said she wanted to tell you about me. This summer." Thomas looked from one to the other. "In May I wrote her a letter. I couldn't say it on the phone — I hadn't been able to for six years. That I wasn't angry any more. That I was getting worse and wanted to see her while there was still time. And on the Sunday she didn't say a word about it. Nor the next one. Two months. I decided that was my answer."

"She never got it," Nigel said suddenly. He didn't know where the certainty came from, but it was solid as an oak board. "We didn't find a single letter from you in the house, apart from one card from 2016. Mum kept everything. Even receipts. If your letter had arrived, it would have been in the filing cabinet."

Thomas looked at him for a long moment.

"Then why did she come on the third of August?"

"Because she couldn't wait any longer, I suppose," Florence said softly.

Later a tired young doctor came in and explained it briefly: the transplanted kidney was failing. Rejection. Dialysis was holding things, but only for now. He needed a second transplant. The waiting list for a deceased-donor kidney was two to three years. Thomas didn't have that long.

"What about a living donor?" Nigel asked.

The doctor looked at him more closely.

"Are you a relative?"

"His brother," Nigel said. And at last the word settled in his hand. "Half-brother. Same mother."

"For living donation, siblings have the best odds of a match — half-siblings included." The doctor paused. "But it's major surgery. Weeks of tests. There are risks. You need to understand—"

"No," Thomas said from the bed. His voice was weak but firm. "No. That's not what… That's not why you came here. I'm not taking a kidney from a man I've known for two hours."

"You've known me six years," Nigel said. "Every Sunday. You said so yourself. The shelf that'll survive a nuclear war."

"Nigel—"

"Listen." Nigel went to the bed. His hands were shaking, and he shoved them in his pockets, the way he had as a boy. "For forty years I've been the one in this family who needs rescuing. Nigel who got thrown out of college. Nigel with the debts. Mum gave me two thousand and wrote, 'Don't expect it back.' Kat cleared my debt yesterday. All my life everyone's been giving me things." He let out a breath. "Let me give something, for once. Please. I'm not asking you to agree to a transplant. I'm asking you to let me take the tests. Just so we know."

Thomas looked at him for a long time. Then he looked at Lily. She was standing by the window with both hands pressed to her mouth, and there was so much hope in her eyes that it hurt to look at her.

"She was telling the truth," Thomas said at last. "You are the kindest."

"Also the most stubborn," said Nigel. "I expect she left that bit out."

Thomas laughed — for the first time — and the laugh turned into a cough, and Lily rushed to him with a glass of water.

Nigel gave blood on the second floor. A nurse with a Scottish accent told him the first results would be back in a week, and the full work-up would take a month or two.

"Scared?" she asked, taping a plaster over the crook of his elbow.

"Terrified," Nigel said honestly.

"Good. The ones who aren't scared usually don't understand what they're signing up for."

When he came out into the corridor, Florence was sitting on a plastic chair, staring at nothing. When she saw her brother, she stood up and hugged him without a word — tightly, properly, the way she hadn't hugged him since they were children.

"Mum would have been—" she began.

"Don't," said Nigel. "Or I'll start crying in front of the nurses."

His phone buzzed in his pocket. Katherine.

Nigel answered, and before he could say a word about Thomas, about the kidney, about the fact that he now had a brother, his older sister's voice on the line — even, cold, dangerously calm — said:

"Nige. I know who Derek Pierce really is. And I've found Thomas's letter. The one from May. It wasn't lost. It was stolen."