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 the first thing he did — before anything else, before he even told her they were related properly — was make her go and get tested.

Not for the heart. For the variant.

Because he had worked out, in about four seconds in a consultant’s office, that if his father had given it to him, his father might have given it to her.

She does not have it. She was tested in the August and she does not carry it.

That is in the letter twice. Once in the middle and once at the end, underlined.

***She hasn’t got it, Mum. I checked. That was the first thing.***

And the eleven meetings, which I know about because Lena told me, one by one, over about four visits, in order.

The first was in a café by the station in the July, and lasted twenty-two minutes, and was, she says, the worst twenty-two minutes of her life.