Here is what the whole thing gave us, beyond Lily’s life.
It gave us each other.
David and his wife — the private, distant people I’d nodded at for years — are not distant anymore. You cannot stay at arm’s length from the family whose son is, quite literally, inside your daughter’s blood. Our two families have Sunday dinners now. David taught Ethan to fish. His wife and I have become the kind of friends who don’t need a reason to call. The wall those private people built around themselves came down the only way walls like that ever do — when someone’s child reaches straight through it.
David apologized to Ethan properly, man to boy, for the cold years. Ethan, who holds a grudge about as well as water holds a shape, just shrugged and said, “It’s okay. You didn’t know me yet.” Which undid David all over again.
Ethan and Lily are still inseparable. People ask if they’ll end up together someday, and I tell them that misses the point entirely. What those two have is older and plainer than that. He gave her his hair when she was ashamed, and his marrow when she was dying, and he did both without being asked and without wanting credit, because to Ethan, Lily being okay has simply always been part of the definition of his own okayness.
