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 more sure that I was doing the right thing.

What she has of him.

I have to be careful here, because people want this bit to be mystical and it is not.

She does not like the food he liked. She has not taken up football. She does not dream about him.

She has a scar down her sternum that she showed me in the August without being asked, and a bag of tablets she will take every day for the rest of her life, and a clinic appointment every eight weeks.

And she has, she says, one thing.

She had never in her life been able to run. Not once. Not since she was fifteen, and not much before it.

And in the June she ran for a bus. Half a street. And caught it.

And she sat down on that bus and cried the whole way home, and the woman opposite asked if she was all right.