The Day I Was Diagnosed

A woman spends her savings on a younger man who cannot speak, joining him in bungee jumping, racing, diving and skydiving, and secretly signs a donor form to give her heart to his sick mother. At the hospital she learns the truth: the man is the director's son, an Ivy League graduate who has been playing a poor mute as a game, calling her old and tacky and planning to move on.

She tears up the form and offers herself for a painful cancer drug trial with a low cure rate, on one condition: that the Sterling family adopt her as a daughter. She glimpses Luke Sterling in a photo, wearing a luxury watch on a yacht beside another girl, and later hears him speak for the first time, mocking her to his friends at a club.

She stops replying to his messages and waits for him to come home, holding her hospital report. He knows only that she has severe anemia, not that she is dying, and she wonders whether the truth would make him regret his pranks.