Because a donation like this is not nothing. It’s a real procedure, with real risks, done to my child, my fourteen-year-old, whose body I had sworn since the day he was born to protect. Saying yes meant choosing to let someone hurt my healthy son, deliberately, to try to save someone else’s child.
And Ethan watched me do that math on my face, and what he said next is the moment I stopped thinking of him as a boy.
“Mom. If it was me in that bed. If I was the one dying, and somewhere out there was the one person who matched me, and their mom said no because it was scary—” He stopped. “I already decided. I decided at the swab drive. I just need you to be as brave as I already was.”
I looked at my son.
Then I looked at David, Lily’s father, who had been cold to my boy for four years and was now sitting with his whole life in my hands.
