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 I put it on.

And there it was.

I had my hand on that chest at ten past four in the morning on the twenty-eighth of February and felt it stop.

And I sat in my own front room, one year later, and listened to it going, in a girl I had not known existed eighteen months before.

And the thing I had not expected was that it is not a comfort. Not exactly. It is not him. It is a heart, in somebody else, doing its job, and it does not know anything about either of us.

But it is going.

And after a while I gave her the stethoscope back, and she put it in her bag, and neither of us said anything for a bit.

And then she said: “He wrote me one too, you know. A letter.”

I did not know.

“Can I tell you what the last line says?”