Before my 19-year-old son di3d, he donated his heart to an 18-year-old girl — after the transplant, her mother handed me a letter from my son that began, “Mom, there’s something you need to know about her.”

And Lena sat at my kitchen table — the table — and was so frightened she could not hold her cup properly.

And she said: “I want to say something first, before anything. I didn’t ask him for it.”

And I said I know.

And she said: “No, but I need you to know. When he told me what he wanted to do I said no. I said no for about three weeks. I told him to give it to somebody on the list, a stranger, properly.”

“And he said, There’s no such thing as a stranger on that list, Lena. There’s only somebody else’s sister.“

And then she put her head down on my kitchen table and sobbed, and I sat there with my hand on the back of a girl my husband made behind my back, and I have never in my life been less sure what I was doing.