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.”

Four pages.

And I am going to set out what was in it, because it took me about a year to be able to say it out loud to anybody.

Her name is Lena. She is eighteen. She has had a cardiomyopathy since she was fifteen and she had been on the list for eleven months.

And she is Martin’s daughter.

My husband’s.

She was born on the second of September, 2006.

Cian was born on the fifteenth of April, 2005.

Which means she was started somewhere around the December of 2005. When our son was eight months old.

How Cian found out.

Not by accident, and not by snooping.

When they were investigating him, in the April, the geneticist asked about family history on both sides. Nobody could tell them anything about Martin’s, because Martin’s parents were dead and he had no siblings.

So Cian had the genetic testing. Which found the variant. Which is inherited, and which came from his father.