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in with him now, but I think it's bad. You leave your bags. I'll have Tommy get them and move your car. You just get in to your daddy.”
    Dorene did as commanded. Her mother had died of ovarian cancer when she was a teen and Lucretia had been the closest thing she'd had to a mother since. She'd been away at boarding school during the school year, since her father had been in Washington, DC, but Lucretia had made coming home feel like home and sent all the care packages she could have asked for.
    “How is he?” she asked the doctor when she entered.
    Her father opened his eyes and started to give his standard protest that she had better things to do than sit around at his bedside, but he didn't have the fight in him. It scared her.
    “You shush, Daddy. Lucretia told me to come and I'm glad she did.” He did whatever Lucretia commanded, too, so he had to understand that. She took a breath and fought the tears stinging her eyes. He would want her strong.
    “How's school?” he asked. Dorene heard the full lecture he normally would have given even though he didn't have the strength to say it.
    “It will wait. I'm top of my class and a well-rounded person cares about more than just her standings.”
    The corner of his mouth edged up as he tried to smile at her. “My girl. So proud.”
    He fell asleep not long after that and she dragged the doctor out to get the prognosis.
    “He'll probably recover from the flu,” he said. “But the drugs we had to use have had a side effect—it's rare, but your father wasn't honest with me about how much he drinks. And there was some medical information missing from his records. His liver couldn't take it and I'm afraid the trickle effect is in the kidney. He's got weeks, maybe, but not months. And certainly not years.”
    “Kidney? He's got another, right? Or we can try for a transplant?” Dorene said.
    “He only has the one. That was the medical information I alluded to. If he'd told me, I wouldn't have used the drug—this side effect is rare, but common enough that, had I known, I would have gone with a milder drug.”
    “Where'd the other kidney go?” That seemed like something she should have known.
    “A brother?” The doctor didn't sound sure, like he didn't know whether to believe it.
    Dorene was confused, though her father did have a few brothers. “How was that not in his medical records?”
    “They did it abroad. He said the brother had a criminal record and couldn't come to the States. It was done quietly. Your father said his career couldn't have taken it if this was known—a shame, really. A man who donates a kidney is a hero, no matter who the recipient is.”
    That brother. The one she'd never met. He'd left the US well before political pundits tracked people's life histories and her father had seven other siblings, all law-abiding US citizens, to talk about, so nobody had ever looked into the brother in Quebec. He'd originally dodged the draft for Vietnam, but while he was hiding, he'd also vandalized some military holdings—there'd even been an explosion, though he was a pacifist, so it was an empty facility he'd damaged. Dorene wondered where he was now.
    'Weeks' was enough time to set his affairs in order and say good-bye, but it certainly wasn't time to fill the hole he'd leave in her heart and in her life. And she didn't savor what might happen to Georgia politics without him. Cooperative gentleman politicians were an endangered species.
     
    A few days of caring for her dad and making note of his wishes resigned Dorene to what was going to happen. She even managed to forgive Corbin, probably because in a matter of weeks she'd no longer be a senator's daughter and their relationship would finally have some clarity. She'd be free from wondering what it was he saw in her.
    She went downtown to the capitol where her father had an office to see if she could get a handle on the priorities, make sure his senior people knew what was happening, and bring him a