Heart So Close, So Far

Synopsis

Evelyn, a night-shift welder at a heavy machinery factory in Chicago’s South Side, is forced to sell her blood at a black-market clinic because she cannot afford her mother’s exorbitant opioid detox bills. Her blood test results unexpectedly fall into the hands of Victor, the de facto controller of a railroad company that monopolizes agricultural freight routes across the Midwest. Victor suffers from a recessive hereditary disorder that causes his hematopoietic system to fail, and his time is running out—he has only until he turns thirty. Evelyn is the only person in the United States who carries the specific, fully compatible targeted antibodies needed to serve as his long-term living blood reservoir. To save his own life, Victor used his influence to freeze his mother’s medical benefits and forced Evelyn into a cold-blooded, blood-contract marriage, locking her away in a mansion on the shores of Lake Michigan. In this strictly hierarchical upper-class estate, Evelyn is reduced to a medical substitute, ready to be drained at any moment. Her half-brother Noah, coveting control of the massive trust fund, publicly splashes the blood of a dead deer on Evelyn at the family’s fall hunting camp—a cruel act of class degradation and humiliation—but unexpectedly provokes a violent, desperate counterattack from Victor. Victor’s act of protecting his sister—raising his hunting rifle to shatter Noah’s kneecap—transforms their cold-blooded blood-drawing contract into a deadly bond. However, Noah secretly bribes their private physician to tamper with clinical data, completely erasing the fact that a full extraction of bone marrow stem cells would lead to Evelyn’s inevitable death from organ failure. On the eve of his 30th birthday, a deeply moved Victor resolved to terminate the contract even if it meant enduring organ failure. Unwitting of the truth and mistakenly believing she had been abandoned, Evelyn—determined to repay the debt of gratitude—voluntarily entered the sterile collection chamber while he lay in a deep coma. Fatal complications erupted immediately. As she went into shock and coughed up blood, Evelyn realized with horror that the so-called compassion was nothing more than a stranglehold designed to steal her very life. Fighting for her life, she smashed the backup oxygen tank, setting the isolation chamber ablaze, and used the fire as a cover to escape. Eight years later, amid the drizzling rain of a bankrupt Detroit neighborhood, Evelyn—whose optic nerves had severely atrophied due to the aftereffects of a transplant rejection—stubbornly and lucidly raised her six-year-old daughter, Milo, by sewing leather car seat covers. To raise the money for a cornea transplant that would restore her mother’s sight, Milo—as tenacious as a weed—tried to block the bulldozers carrying out the violent forced demolition in the ruins of a demolished neighborhood. She bit through the wrist of the developer who had ordered the clearance, sparking a thunderous campaign to wipe them out. As Victor ruthlessly persecuted this mother-daughter duo from the lowest rungs of society—even going so far as to use his official authority to cut off the water supply to their shelter—he never imagined that the woman standing before him, her vision blurred yet clutching a steel pipe and refusing to back down, was none other than his late wife, whom he had spent eight years in hell searching for. And the child who had bitten him and refused to let go carried a rare genetic trait matching his blood type. As the layers of the medical assassination from years past were peeled back, the once-powerful perpetrator was reduced to a prisoner tortured by blood ties and remorse. He was forced to perform a bloody sacrifice by cutting open his own chest to complete an organ transplant, begging for desperate redemption from the welder and her daughter—the very people he had personally pushed into the abyss.