Page 64 of Gone Before Goodbye
Nadia closes her eyes and shakes her head no.
“Please,” Maggie says. “It’s important.”
“Why?”
Maggie needs to keep this moving. “I’ve seen the design before,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Please, Nadia. Can you just tell me where you got it? Why do you have it?”
Nadia pulls up her legs as though trying to protect them.
“Nadia?”
“Leave me alone.”
“They’re making me leave soon.”
“What?”
“Something is going on. I can’t find Oleg. They want me to leave. Please, Nadia, I need to know about the tattoo.”
“But why?” Nadia asks—and now there seems to be a small accusation in her tone. “Have you seen that tattoo before?”
“Yes,” Maggie says.
“On other young girls?” Nadia asks. “Or boys?”
“No,” Maggie says. “On someone I loved very much.”
Nadia blinks. “I don’t understand.”
“Nadia, please tell me how you got it.”
Her voice turns stone-cold. “You know already.”
“What? No, I don’t.”
“This loved one,” Nadia says. “Did he also donate a kidney?”
“No. Why would you ask that?”
“Because,” she says, “that’s when I got mine.”
Maggie makes a face. “When you donated your kidney?”
She nods. “He put me under for the operation. When I woke up, my kidney was gone, and on my leg…” She shrugs away the end of the thought.
Maggie tries not to look horrified. “The tattoo was just on your leg?”
“Yes.”
“So they put it on while you were under?”
Nod.
“And you’d never seen it before?”
