Luke was eighteen — old enough to be an organ donor, old enough to understand the risks the doctors had explained. And unlike me, who couldn’t bear to think about those risks, Luke had thought about them clearly. He’d registered as a full organ donor before the surgery. Not just the partial liver donation for Hannah — everything, if the worst happened. He’d done the paperwork himself, quietly, and asked the transplant coordinator to keep it between them, because he knew if I found out he was preparing to die, I’d have fallen apart, and I’d have tried to stop him from helping Hannah at all.
He was eighteen and he planned for his own death so that if the one-in-a-million happened, his death would save as many people as his life could reach.
And it did. When Luke died of that complication, he became, in the space of a day, a donor to several strangers. His liver — the rest of it — went to someone. His kidneys. His corneas. And his heart went to a forty-year-old man named Peter, a father of two who’d been dying on a transplant list, out of time, when a perfect heart became available from a boy who’d registered as a donor eleven days before.
