And I thought about the wig — about a fourteen-year-old who took months of teasing, who grew his hair out so a sick girl could feel like herself in a mirror — and I understood that the wig and the match were the same act. That my son had simply decided, with his entire uncomplicated heart, that he was going to give Lily whatever he had. His hair. His marrow. Whatever it took.
How do you say no to that?
How do you raise a child to be exactly that good, and then, at the one moment it counts, tell him to be less?
“Okay,” I said. My voice shook. “Okay. We’ll do the consultation. We’ll hear every risk, and we’ll ask every question, and if the doctors tell me my son is safe—” I took a breath. “Then yes, Ethan. Yes. We’ll save her.”
My son threw his arms around me and sobbed like the fourteen-year-old he still was, and across the desk, a proud and private man reached over and gripped my hand, and neither of us bothered to pretend we weren’t both crying in a principal’s office.
