I thought about the little round bandage I’d seen in the crook of his arm three weeks ago. “Gym,” he’d said. A blood draw, I understood now. The confirmatory test.
“And I am,” Ethan said, and his voice broke on it. “Mom, out of everyone — I’m a match. I can give her the transplant. I can be the one.”
The wig had never been the gift.
The wig was what a boy does with his hands while his heart is doing something enormous in secret.
Chapter 3: Why Her Father Came
Lily’s father — his name was David, I learned, in that office, after years of nodding at him across a parking lot — was not there to accuse my son of anything.
He was there because he was drowning, and a fourteen-year-old boy had just thrown his daughter a rope, and he did not know how to look the boy’s mother in the eye and ask for the thing he needed to ask for.
